Postscript
by Tiny Octopus
Summary: Ken tries to redefine his life as something other than a tragedy, but the alternatives aren't much better. The sequel to Antonym.
1. PS: We Need to Talk

**I don't know if anyone is even waiting for this anymore since Antonym has been over for so long, but here it is by popular demand. This is the sequel to Antonym, so you should definitely read that before reading this. I'll also** **be using the manga timeline now since I've actually read it (though Antonym was vague enough that it could line up with either, so I don't think there will be any major problems).**

 **Warnings for usual Tokyo Ghoul things (blood, mild gore, cannibalistic thoughts) and discussion of suicide, which is again a recurring theme.**

 **Dedicated to all of my readers, but especially Delta Marauder, as our exchange was what really sowed the seeds for this.**

* * *

"My life is a postwar story," Ken says at some point.

He says it to himself, because there's not really anybody else around he thinks would understand or appreciate what he's trying to say. Banjou and his tag-alongs aren't exactly well-read, and he has no interest in chatting with Tsukiyama more than necessary. Hinami is still too young to understand all of the underlying themes, the symbolism of events or characters, which just leaves him with himself.

 _Well, no, there is another option,_ says a dangerous inner voice, the same one that urges him to act rather than think, to destroy rather than run and eat when he isn't hungry, _There is someone else._

Postwar stories are tragedies of a sort, he thinks. The one that sticks out the most prominently in his memory is something by Shotaro Yasuoka—the one where his father comes back from the war and everything gets worse—which he read in high school and distinctly remembers that he just didn't enjoy. He supposes he's always had a fondness for stories further removed from reality, like Murakami's _Strange Library_ or any of Ranpo's ero-guro-nonsense short stories. It's why he enjoyed Sen Takatsuki's work so much; it was so gruesome and unsettling and unlike anything he ever encountered in his life.

He still likes her books. They've just lost the charm they had when he was an ordinary literature student and he didn't know what a person's mangled, bloody, partially-digested remains looked like yet.

Missing or incompetent fathers. Victimized mothers. Children forced to make a choice between the devil they know and the threatening unknown. These are all themes of postwar film and literature, things that Ken related to strongly that drove him to dislike it even more.

 _The antonym of relating to something,_ he thinks, _Must be alienation._

Unable to sit still anymore, he throws on a jacket and heads for the door.

From the next room, he can hear the others whispering, worry seeping into their voices. "He's leaving again," Hinami says, "He's always going off by himself like this. Shouldn't we go with him?"

"He needs his space," he hears Tsukiyama say, "Let's leave him be for now."

There are a number of secrets Ken pretends he keeps from them, and they quietly allow him to believe it even though nobody is being fooled anymore. One of these things is his habit of returning to the 20th ward despite his insistence that he was leaving it behind for the benefit of those who still lived there. He knows they must have noticed by now, but he's careful to shake off anyone curious enough to follow by the time he actually gets to his destination, so there's at least one thing they aren't aware of.

He's been following Eika Ishihara on her way home from class for the past two months.

She hasn't noticed, either, always distracted and lost in her own head. He wonders if she's thinking about him and wondering where he went. He thinks about her, of course, about could have beens and should have beens, a hundred lost chances, all of her books, the way she destroyed her own hands, her _scent_. Ken doesn't want her to miss him, but he wouldn't mind if she kept the memories close, if she didn't forget about him. He wouldn't mind so much if that's what keeps her distracted.

But then he gets to thinking, _what if?_ What if somebody else is also watching from the shadows? What if they try to sneak up on her or hurt her, and she just walks right towards them, oblivious to the danger the world around her poses? There is so much wrong with the world and so many monsters lurking in it; Ken knows that better than anyone now. They would take you, they would tie you down, they would take out their syringes and their pliers and their bone saws and they would hack you to pieces one chunk at a time, starting with your fingers and toes and ending with your mind, making you watch and pay attention, making you into something you weren't before.

 _Yamori took a wriggling centipede and put it in his ear before cupping his hands over it. The creature went towards the greatest source of warmth to make its burrow, and Ken screamed until his throat was raw. He could feel it inside of him, all legs and stinging bites, he could hear it scratching and digging around, its skittering like bees buzzing against his eardrum before it ate right through it, and he thinks he vomited the first time._

So Ken keeps going to the 20th ward, keeps stalking her route every day, and keeps her safe. He's lost so much, so many people, so much time, so much of himself; he's determined to put his losses behind him and focus on holding onto what he has, even if it is from a distance.

But tonight, he feels a little greedy.

He's always watching the back of her head, her hair that she's stopped braiding since the last time she saw him—not him, not really, not anymore, just the weak child he had been born as, the half-ghoul who hid himself in human skin and pretended the world was fair—and just that by itself had been enough for him. But Ken has acquired an impulsivity he'd never known before meeting Yamori, and sometimes, he just does things without thinking about them, or even remembering them.

 _Yamori took and took and took, and he just kept taking, trying to hollow Ken out until there was nothing left. He didn't realize that he gave, too, that he left behind so much of himself in the space he carved. The horrible, tainted, blood-soaked mess he poured into took the shape of its vessel, and Ken as he is now is what happened when it all hardened into jagged edge and warped surfaces._

So tonight, he goes ahead of the train to meet her, leaping across rooftops with the help of his kagune, and walks towards her instead of behind her for once, hoping he can see her face.

It's buried in a book.

Of course it is. He doesn't know why he's surprised. That's the way they met, after all. He glances instinctively at the cover, finding the title _Zoo_ below the pen name Otsuichi, and he knows he's read it before, but he can't seem to remember what it's about. He doesn't read much for pleasure anymore.

 _He sees words on the wall on the inside of his head, but they seem to be painted on the insides of his eyelids, refusing to leave him alone even when he tries to sleep. He doesn't read them as much as he hears them, a voice that must be his own even though it's so distorted and broken, and it tells him to eat._

Her scent hits him a moment later, and Ken's eyes widen at all of the memories that come flooding back; walking her home, finding her at the edge of the road, playing the antonym game. It's sweet, so sweet that his eyes start to water.

 _So sweet he could just eat her._

But he won't. He would never do that. Even though Ken is not who he used to be, there are some things that have not, and will never, change.

He's so distracted that he reacts too slowly, unable to change his course from walking straight into her. A few months ago, he might have toppled over, but he hardly moves, coming to a complete stop and watching Eika stumble into the wall of the unlit storefront beside her. _Zoo_ lands a few feet away, and he makes another impulsive decision, snatching it up before she notices. He hears a muttered apology as she straightens herself.

Ken freezes for only half of a second, berating himself for being seen, for letting her speak to him, for making physical contact.

 _Even if it was nice. Even if it was so, so nice. Eika wears her hair differently but she smells exactly the same. He could probably pick her out in a crowd, could probably find her like a bloodhound if all he had was a scrap of her clothing._

He reminds himself that he shouldn't be this close to her. "It's okay," he tells her hurriedly, already starting to leave, "Be careful." He doesn't hear any footsteps behind him, but he feels her eyes on his back. It's too late to make a quick getaway with his kagune unless he wants to really screw this up. He lets out a quiet sigh when he hears her take a step in the opposite direction, but she suddenly stops and speaks again.

"Excuse me, do I know you?"

The words are hesitant. She isn't sure. Ken keeps his back to her; he shouldn't be here, shouldn't have said anything to her, because now there are all sorts of things he wants to say. "Do I seem familiar?" he asks, trying to keep his voice steady.

"Yes," she says, though pauses afterwards. "Maybe you just remind me of someone I read about recently."

Ken tries to calm down. This is his cue to tell her to take care and leave. He opens his mouth. "Really? You remind me of someone from a book, too." What comes out isn't at all what he's supposed to say. "Rather, you remind me of his antonym."

The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them, straight from the walls and insides of his eyes, and he notices things, hears her sharp intake of breath, her heart rate increasing, her scent becoming even more pronounced. Hopeful, he thinks, she's hopeful. She's wanted to see him as much as he's wanted to see her. He'd rather stay, rather sit and talk like they used to, about books or life or anything, really, but he's made enough stupid, impulsive decisions for one day.

He allows himself just one more.

With a swiftness only ghouls can possess, he turns on his heel and closes the distance between them, giving himself only a second to take in her face—glasses framing wide eyes that slowly soften, clear and beautiful and human—before he leans in and presses his lips against hers. Eika smells good, but she tastes even better, and it takes every ounce of self-restraint he has to pull away, unfurling his rinkaku to launch himself onto the nearest rooftop.

He doesn't want to go, but he promised himself that he would take care of everything that's precious to him without getting too close. He would watch over Eika from a distance, because that way, he could make sure nothing hurt her. Not other humans, not ghouls.

Not even him.

He carves the promise into his brain, a constant reminder on the wall of spoken words in his conscious mind; he will not get any closer than strictly necessary. Despite everything that's changed, he thinks he can manage that.

* * *

 _From the Brink of Despair: A Memoir_ receives glowing reviews for its unique style, compelling narrative and uplifting message. Eika Ishihara is all smiles during her first book signing and all subsequent talks she gives around campus, but she feels like she's sleepwalking, like none of it's real and she's sure to wake up soon. She's not really thinking about her book at all, not when her professor congratulates her on her successful publishing, or when she's invited to her old high school to give a talk, or when she has a television appearance.

What she's thinking of are her regrets, and to keep a smile on her face and a spring in her step, she focuses on the ones that hurts the least.

The talk show host, a middle-aged woman who looks surprised when Eika walks in, like she was expecting someone taller, crosses her legs and rests her hands in her lap where a copy of Eika's memoir is resting. "Miss Ishihara, it's a pleasure to have you here with us today," she says pleasantly, and Eika settles into the chair across from her.

"Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here," Eika says hollowly, because she's not sure that it really is.

The host asks a few leading questions about her book before switching to what Eika knew was coming, the hot topic lately for literary critics and gossip columnists alike. "Now, I'm sure you've been asked about this before, but I hoped we could talk a little bit about one of the middle sections," the host says, flipping through her copy, "In the chapter where you get coffee while planning your suicide, you meet a young man who stops to talk to you about the book you were reading. You're so thrown off that you put off your plans, and become a regular at the coffee shop just so you can see him. He also saves your life later on."

Eika holds the host's gaze, waiting for it.

"But your critics have pointed out that, as important as this boy is, you never give his name nor do you ever describe him," she continues, "And you never tells us what happened to him. After the recovery chapter, he's only mentioned in passing, and you never speak to him again. Some people have said you made him up to add a romance subplot!"

There's a light chuckle in the studio audience, and Eika allows herself a small smile.

"So let's set the record straight," the host says, setting the book down and meeting her eyes eagerly, "What's up with this mysterious young man? Is he made up for the story? Was he meant to be a metaphor for something? Or did you imagine someone to keep you going during the really hard times?"

Eika glances briefly at the audience members holding their collective breath. "The truth is," she says, "He's real. I've answered this question a lot already, but people keep asking. It's strange to me that he's the most controversial part of the book, though." She smiles down at her hands, fingertips wrapped in bandages, a new habit to fight an old one. "If he knew that, he'd probably be embarrassed."

The host laughs good-naturedly. "I see," she says, "But if he's real, then why don't you tell us more about him? He's such an important figure in the book—and surely, your life—and yet he just breezes in and out without any explanation. There's no closure, no love confessions, nothing."

"I have personal reasons for withholding his name and information about him. As for his sudden appearance and disappearance…" Eika glances at the camera, wondering if Ken is out there somewhere, watching, "Well, it's a memoir. I wrote it just as it really happened."


	2. PS: I Didn't Mean It

**Sorry about the short chapter this week, next week's will be longer. Also, I seem to be all over the place with the order of author's names. I'll pick one and stick with it eventually.**

* * *

Eika spends her weekends in the park, sitting on the same bench with a stack of Sen Takatsuki's books beside her. She doesn't usually read; she watches the people who walk by, eyes carefully scanning their faces, because she's waiting for someone in particular, someone she's never going to find, because Ken isn't that careless. He knows what she's doing, and he isn't going to fall for it.

Whenever he passes through the 20th ward, he makes sure to dress differently and covers his face with a scarf or a hood, lingering with the crowds at the end of the street and never passing in front of her. Ken waits for her to stop looking, for her to stop speaking to the camera during interviews and staying an extra half-hour at book signings watching the window. He waits for the day that he'll come by the park and she won't be searching for him.

But she never gives up. Weeks pass, and she keeps waiting. She starts to read out loud to anybody who's listening, and each time he sees her, he wonders if just a few more words, just one more taste, wouldn't hurt.

 _He shouldn't, he shouldn't and he knows it, but he wants it so bad, and doesn't he deserve that after everything he's been through? Doesn't he deserve something that would be gentle and soft under his hands, after all of the needles and centipedes, losing pieces of himself again and again and again—!_

"He knew when he arrived that his mother had been there," Eika reads, "She was all around him. The oppressive stench of rotted meat was like her embrace. The dark red splatters dried on the walls were like her smile. The slab of flesh that had once been a human lying in the middle of the floor was like the echo of her voice, saying, 'Look here, my darling, and see how beautiful humans are underneath all of their lies and their skin.' The son of the black goat could not say that he loved his mother, but after all this time, he had begun to understand her."

 _Understand?_

 _Yes, he does now, he completely understands. Rize ate and ate and ate. She ate until the hollowness inside of her was filled with flesh, and then she ate even more. She ate to ease her boredom, to kill the time that never flowed fast enough, leaving her with days of repetitive meaninglessness. She ate, and she had no regrets._

 _He resents her even now, but in some ways, he is grateful to Rize for giving birth to him, in a sense. If it weren't for her, he would never have the strength he has now. All he had to do was let the centipede inside, let it spread its legs along his nerves and feast upon his weakness. All he had to do was stop fighting it, and accept that he did understand Rize._

 _If he wants something, why shouldn't he just take it?_

Eika isn't reading anymore. The silence is almost deafening, and it brings Ken back out of his thoughts, finding himself right in front of her without ever having realized he moved. She's staring up at him in shock, clutching _The Black Goat's Egg_ in her hands, still open to the page she was just reading from. He isn't ready; he doesn't know what to say to her, what to do. He'd walked up to her without even realizing it, and now he's completely unprepared.

It's too late to back out now, though. She's stared at him long enough that she must be sure it's him.

Ken takes the initiative—another thing he would have struggled with before. " _The Black Goat's Egg_ , huh?" he chuckles, "I haven't read that in a while."

Eika stares at him a moment longer before she scrambles to shove the books aside and make room for him on the bench beside her. "Do you want to sit down?" she asks, and her voice trembles a bit with uncertainty.

Should he, though? Shouldn't he leave now?

 _Stop thinking about it so much._

He sits down. Eika is looking down at the book in her lap, nervously playing with the corners of the page. Ken is trying to come up with something to say, but there's so much he wants to tell her that he can't pick just one thing. He knows he can't stay for long; he can't risk someone recognizing him or seeing them together.

"Sorry, I," Eika laughs nervously, "I didn't think I'd see you here. Or at all."

Ken nods wordlessly.

"Do you want the book?" She closes it to the front cover. "I don't really like it that much."

"Then why did you buy it?" he asks.

Eika bites her lip.

"For bait, right? You were using it as bait." He feels a smile working its way onto his face. "That's actually really funny. A year ago, it would've worked right away."

She relaxes visibly, returning his smile. "It still worked, didn't it?"

"I guess it did."

They lapse into silence, listening to the birds chirping overhead and cars passing on the road nearby. Eika looks down at her feet. "I wrote a memoir, you know. You're in it."

"I heard. Everyone thinks you made me up or imagined me."

She laughs. "Sometimes, I think that, too." She glances at him cautiously out of the corner of her eye. "Have you read it?"

"I...no, not yet." He looks away. "I bought it a while ago, actually. I just…."

 _It's hard to think about you when I know I can't have you_ , is what he thinks, but he doesn't say anything.

"That's okay." Eika smiles sheepishly. "I was hoping you hadn't bought it yet so I could trade you. I lost a book after I bumped into you last time."

Ken blinks, trying to remember back to what she's talking about. "Oh," he says, laughing, " _Zoo_ , right? I didn't bring it with me, sorry."

"Then bring it with you next weekend," she says, carefully watching his face.

Ken tries not to let his hesitation show, but it must by the way her smile falls. "Next weekend," he murmurs, "Right."

"It's fine," she says, reaching into her bag and pulling out a copy of her memoir, holding it between them. "You can have this copy anyway. It's a special edition. I signed it." She flushes a bit, and he looks at her out of the corner of his eye to take in the sight. "Are you enjoying _Zoo_?"

Ken looks away, rubbing his chin in embarrassment. "Actually, I haven't been reading that, either," he says, "I took it because you spend a lot of time with books in your hands. It...it smells like you." He regrets the words the moment they're out of his mouth, eyes flying to Eika to watch for any disgust or fear. Instead, he finds her trying to cover her laughter with one hand. "Is that funny?"

"It's weird," she says, "But it's cute somehow. I'd expect a guy to smell a girl's clothes, but you smell her books instead, huh? That's just so you."

"Ishihara," he snaps, covering his face with one hand when he feels heat rising to his cheeks. _Embarrassed._ He can't believe this. After everything he's been through, he can still be embarrassed by such a ridiculous comment.

"I'm sorry," she says, looking genuinely worried. "I shouldn't tease you. I really missed you"

Ken's expression softens. "So did I," he says quietly.

"You look different. I'm sure a lot's happened since we talked last. You don't have to tell me about it yet." She holds the memoir out to him. "But I'll be here if you decide you want to."

When Ken reaches for it, she hands it to him and wraps her arms around him.

She's touching him.

 _He hasn't been touched for a long time, hasn't let anyone touch him. He kissed her the last time he saw her, but that was different, he knew that was coming, it was on his terms and he was in control then. This isn't the same, this is her hands on him, around him, trying to keep him from moving, from escaping, and Eika's scent is fading even though it's all around him, because all he really notices is that someone is touching him and trying to keep him still and the last time this happened he was there for days, he was there for so long that he started to forget his name and his age and all concept of time, he lost everything except for numbers, one thousand, one thousand minus seven, minuends and subtrahends, he remembers that, he never lost that._

 _He looks around himself and he sees nothing but rust and blood, his feet in a bucket full of his toes and fingers, and the floor is writhing, the floor is made of centipedes, and it's surging up to meet him, trying to pull him down into oblivion so they can get inside his ears and his eyes and his mouth and they'll eat and eat and eat until there is nothing, not even numbers, left._

 _Yamori's face looms over him, asking if it hurts, the words spoken with a cruel sneer. But he's stronger than Yamori now, he knows he is. He reaches for his throat and pulls him down, because if he has to die here, the centipedes will devour them both._

"Ken," Eika whimpers, but she wasn't there, was she? She wasn't in that room with Yamori, and he's thankful for that.

Ken blinks and he's back in the park, Eika trapped under him on the bench. His hand is on her neck, and she's scratching his wrist, tears in her eyes. Two of his kagune are arcing over him, the pointed ends dangerously close to her face.

 _Oh._

 _Oh no._

 _No, no, no._

"No," Ken whispers, releasing her and falling backwards off of the bench. He scrambles to his feet and backs away, looking down at his own hands in horror. They're clean. His hands are clean. Eika isn't bleeding. He can still smell her on him, though. Her sweat, her fear. He meets her eyes and finds her sitting up slowly, coughing as she rubs the bruising skin at her neck, blooming red like spider lilies, her heartbeat filling his ears alongside his own. She's afraid. Of course she's afraid.

"Kaneki," she says hoarsely. Did she try to scream for help? "What...why…?"

"I'm sorry," he whispers, never breaking her gaze as he backs away, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Stupid. So stupid. He knew this would happen. It's his fault, but he still feels frustrated with Eika. Why does she keep looking for him? Why does she keep haunting him, calling to him with that look in her eyes and the books she brings with her only so he'll come closer? _Doesn't she understand that the boy in the memoir is dead?_

Ken runs. He runs until the park and Eika and her scent are all far, far away.


	3. PS: Thanks For Listening

**If you have left me a message lately and I haven't gotten back to you, I'm really sorry! I'm in my final year at Uni and I'm up to my neck in papers and presentations, but I really appreciate every message I get even if I don't answer!**

* * *

In Otsuichi's "In a Falling Airplane," there are three people who meet by chance in a plane headed for Haneda. One is a Tokyo University hopeful who failed the entrance exam one too many times who intends to commit suicide by taking the whole plane down with him. Another is a woman looking for revenge in Haneda on the man who raped her in high school. The third is a failed salesman who illegally purchased euthanasia from a senile doctor and tries to make one last sales pitch. It's one of the short stories in _Zoo_ , although Ken has always thought it didn't really belong with the others. The rest of the collection is more reminiscent of Edogawa Ranpo's works, and though there are some others with a similar tone, they're all about inexplicable strangeness. "In a Falling Airplane" isn't like that, though. It's about vengeance and mourning dead dreams and trying to decide what matters most, and maybe that hits too close to home.

He feels like he heard something about a scandal lately, something about Eika's novel that was quickly swept under the rug almost as soon as it came up, but he didn't pay much attention at the time because he isn't the sort to care about or buy into rumors. It's another thing he wishes he could talk to the others about, but he's been keeping Eika something of a dirty secret.

After a long day of politicking with the higher powers of the 6th ward and sparring with Banjou or Tsukiyama, he always excuses himself after sunset on "personal errands" that he'd rather take care of alone. At first, he nearly had to beat the others off of him with a stick to get them to leave him alone for a few minutes, and he still isn't sure why he was ever so defensive about it. Of course, going off by himself every night for several months had the entire group speculating where he was going whenever they didn't think he was in earshot.

Surprisingly—or perhaps not, given her observational skills—Hinami is the first to figure it out.

"He's going to see his girlfriend," he hears her proclaim one evening after he's retired for the night. Ordinarily, he doesn't leave his room again after he comes back from visiting the 20th ward, but he came home and couldn't find _Zoo_ anywhere, and he now has a pretty good idea of where it went. He peeks around the doorway of the living room and finds Hinami, Banjou and Tsukiyama seated around the coffee table, heads close together as they whisper almost conspiratorially over the book Hinami has clutched to her chest.

"Girlfriend?" Banjou echoes, sounding surprised, "You mean Touka?"

"No, not Touka, it's," Hinami pauses, confidence wavering, "Um...Yoshika, I think."

"Hinami," Ken says stiffly from the doorway, and the three of them jump in surprise, "I'm glad you're reading, but you should really ask me if you're going to borrow one of my books." He holds out a hand expectantly and, eyes pointed at the floor in guilt, she trots over and hands him _Zoo_. He opens the cover and looks down at where Eika's name is scrawled inside. "The first kanji is read as 'Ei,' by the way, not 'Yoshi.'"

"Ei?" Hinami repeats, eyes brightening. "So it's _Ei_ ka. Her name is Eika!"

"Kaneki, is this true?" Tsukiyama asks, sounding almost scandalized at Ken keeping secrets, "You really have a secret lover?"

Ken closes his eyes and lets out a long sigh. "No, she's not—!"

"It makes perfect sense!"

"See, I _told_ you!"

Banjou glances between them, feeling left out. "But how did you know?"

"I saw Eika before," Hinami says proudly, "At Anteiku. So I remember what she smells like. And then, Ken brought back that book, which also smells like her, and it has her name written in it." She glances at him as if for confirmation. "So I'm right, aren't I?"

Ken looks at Hinami's expectant, hopeful face, and shakes his head. "You shouldn't jump to conclusions," he says simply, glancing down at the book and running a hand over the cover. He can feel their eyes on him still and knows he's just opened a can of worms. He hesitates a moment before continuing, "There is a person named Eika who I am in contact with, but we haven't been speaking."

"But why not?" Hinami asks.

 _Because I almost strangled her and impaled her on my kagune a few days ago._

"Because I'm trying to protect her from a distance," he answers, "Just like the people at Anteiku."

Banjou looks like he's willing to drop the topic out of respect, but neither of the other two look willing to let it go. "This person wouldn't happen to be your 'personal errand,' would they?" Tsukiyama asks curiously, "It seemed to me that something happened a few days ago. You came back earlier than usual and holed yourself up in your room. Did she upset you…?"

"It wasn't her fault," Ken says immediately, almost defensively. He takes a deep breath. "I overstepped the limits I set for myself, that's all."

"But you like Eika, right?" Hinami asks, "So why do you have to be so far away from her?"

"For the same reason I have to stay far away from Anteiku. I want to keep her safe, and the best way to do that is from a distance."

Hinami frowns. "You don't want her to get hurt," she says, "But she'll get hurt anyway, won't she? Just not the same kind of hurt."

"What do you mean?"

"Not the kind where you fall and bruise your knee," Hinami says softly, "But the kind where someone important to you isn't there anymore."

"That's…" Ken hesitates. He wants to tell her that it isn't like that, but he can't quite bring the words out.

"You kind of remind me of Mom and Dad," she says cheerfully, "When I was really little, I remember sometimes they'd both be quiet for a long time, and they'd just stare at each other. I didn't really understand it, but I think that's how they said they loved each other without even talking. You did that with Eika at Anteiku." She grins. "You should bring her here! Then Mr. Banjou and Flower Man can meet her, too."

"No," Ken says, with a little more bite than he intended. Hinami looks up at him with her big eyes and sticks out her lower lip, trying to get him to change his mind, but he holds his ground.

"It's alright, Hinami," Banjou intervenes, "Ken doesn't have to do that if he doesn't feel comfortable with it."

"But Eika was nice. I don't think she would mind."

"Yeah, but you have to think about how Ken feels, too…."

Ken starts heading for the door, bending to put his shoes on. He hears Hinami's light footsteps hurry to him. "I'm sorry!" she cries, "I didn't mean to make you mad, I just-!"

"It's alright, Hinami," he says, and turns to give her a reassuring smile and ruffle her hair affectionately. "I'm not mad. You said some really insightful things."

She brightens immediately. "Are you going to talk to Eika now?"

He sighs. "Yes."

 _Against my better judgement._

* * *

After all of the times he's followed her home, he knows exactly where Eika lives.

When she started at Kamii, she moved into an apartment not far from campus. He remembers seeing a woman with a similar scent who must have been her mother help her move—and Ken doesn't dwell on what it means that he went by scent rather than how similar their faces were. Under the cover of night, he leaps up to her balcony on the third floor. Through the glass doors, he can see her at her desk, focused on homework. Half of him is content to just stay there and enjoy the sight of her relaxed, but that won't fix anything. Hesitantly, he knocks twice on the glass, watching her jump and look over at him, nearly falling out of her chair.

She walks to the balcony doors slowly, looking torn about whether or not she should really open them. Ken holds her gaze as she comes closer, within arm's reach if not for the thin glass separating them.

 _He could break it. He could break it, and it would be so easy, it would hardly take the flick of his wrist, and then there would be nothing between them._

"Can I come in?" he asks.

She stares silently for a moment. The question he expects is, " _How did you get up here?"_ or maybe, " _Why should I let you in?"_ Instead, she asks, "Why are you using the balcony door?"

"It would've been easier for someone to see me if I used the regular one."

Eika chews on her lip. "If I let you in," she says, "Will you stay this time? Or will you run away again?"

"I'll stay," he promises, "Just...don't touch me, please."

She nods, unlocking the door and stepping away to let him in. Ken shuts it behind him, going to sit on the edge of her bed, and she maintains a respectful distance, sitting across from him at her desk again. Ken glances around the room and tries to think of how to start, but Eika breaks the silence first.

"Ken," she says quietly, "What were those...things that came out of your back?" He flinches, immediately on the defensive, and notices Eika look sheepish, aware of the conversational misstep.

"It was my kagune," he says stiffly.

"Oh. Okay." Apparently, he's saved from one conversation he'd hoped to never have; he supposes it's obvious by now that he isn't completely human. There's a tense silence. He hopes she'll change the subject. "Can...can I see it?"

"No."

"I was just—!"

"Eika, I said no," he snaps, but his expression softens when she leans away. _Recoiling from him._

"I'm sorry," she says.

"No, it's…." He sighs, putting his face in his hands. " _I'm_ sorry. I don't want to be like this." He glances at her. "You need to understand. Kagune are predatory organs. They're what I use to hunt and protect myself. I…."

 _I've killed people with these._

Eika lifts an arm like she means to reach for him but thinks better of it, and it falls into her lap. "I understand," she says, "I won't ask again if you don't want to show me. I only did in the first place because I want you to be able to trust again."

"I do trust you," he says firmly, _More than anyone._

"Not me. Yourself. That's why you ran away, right? Because you don't trust yourself?"

Ken looks down at himself, shaking his head. "I can't. Not yet."

Eika's expression shifts to disappointment for a moment before she becomes determined again. "Then talk to me," she pleads, "Tell me...tell me anything you feel comfortable telling."

 _Tell me what happened to you,_ she's trying to say, because ghoul or not, Ken knows it's obvious that he's different from before. He could say that he doesn't want to scare her, doesn't want her to worry, but he feels guilty as he remembers what Hinami told him.

 _The kind of pain when someone important to you isn't there anymore._

At least Touka and the others were there—they know most of the story and why he had to leave because he was able to tell them.

But the humans—because that's how he thinks of Eika and Hide now, as the humans, as soft-bodied, vulnerable prey animals—never got any explanation, and he at least owes them that.

"It's a horribly story," he warns, "And I've never told it from start to finish before."

 _Last chance to back out._

"Just talk," Eika says, "And stop when you need to."

Ken holds her gaze for a silent moment, both relieved and disappointed that she still wants to know. But if there had to be someone who knew everything that happened, anyone who could understand him and the way he thinks and the way he is….

"This all started for me during my first year at Kamii, with a woman named Rize."

He's glad it's her.

* * *

A year ago, Ken never would have considered himself the protagonist of any story.

Protagonists are strong and perseverant and relatable; he was just a shy wallflower, a tagalong, the best friend or the background character. Being a protagonist was more Hide's thing, or Touka's. Rize made him realize that he is, in fact, a protagonist—the main character, even. If he wasn't, surely he would have died that night. He would have been eaten alive by Rize or the operation that made him into a one-eyed ghoul would have failed. But he didn't die; he lived, and his story—his tragedy, his chronicle of the postwar—continued.

Despite his reluctance to abandon everything he thought he knew about the world, it continued.

Despite all of the pain and the fear, it continued.

Despite everything that had tries to break him down or swallow him whole, it continued.

No matter how much he sometimes wanted it to stop.

* * *

Ken talks, and the words seem to be endless, the things he wants to say pouring out in a rush of relief. He stumbles but he doesn't stop, not even when he tells her about the emptiness he felt when he tried to carve out his own organs only to discover he couldn't pierce his own skin with a knife or the terrible hunger he suffered when he refused to eat for those first few days. His words, his story, flood the silent air between them, and he watches Eika's eyes, sees her take it all in.

When he tells her about Yamori, she covers her mouth and he thinks she might cry, but she never does. She must know that if she did, he might stop, and he can't stop now, now when he's come so far, spoken things aloud that he's only ever thought about, put into words all of the things he's felt. She continues to listen, wide eyes full of empathetic pain, and Ken continues to speak, until he feels he has nothing left to say.

"So I came here to apologize for leaving without a word," he finishes, and they're back where they started, except this time, she knows everything. Ken feels exposed somehow.

"That's…." Eika swallows, hesitates. Ken sees a million words flash through her eyes and knows she's struggling to pick just a few. "That's horrible. I can't even explain to you what I feel now that you've told me all that." She shakes her head. "I wish that never happened to you."

Ken almost says, "me, too," reflexively, but he bites it back, not wanting to lie. He can't say he'd honestly go back to the way things were before. He was living the way his mother had, bending over backwards for other people, letting them walk on him, meekly watching the days pass by without really seizing his life with his own hands. His first time really taking a risk, really living, was when he had tried to get involved with Rize, and it was obvious how _that_ had turned out.

But in a way, he's glad it happened that way. If he were the superstitious type, he might even be tempted to think that it was meant to happen. He was meant to meet Rize, and she was meant to pull the curtain back and expose the cruel world for what it really was. He was meant to get the transplant and become part-ghoul, to suffer, to grow stronger for it, and to have the power to protect everything he cared about.

"There are people I want to protect," he says, looking pointedly at her, "Sometimes, protecting them means staying far away. I thought it would be easier that way." Eika's gaze softens in understanding. "But it's not," he continues, "I tried, for a long time, to separate my memory of you from the way I felt about you, and I couldn't do it. I think you must have suffered during that time, too, and I'm sorry for that."

He pauses, giving Eika a chance to speak— _a chance to deny it, maybe, to turn him down now before he gets any deeper into this, but she doesn't, and he won't admit to himself how happiness fills him at her silence._

"I need you to understand," he says firmly, "The last thing I want to do is hurt you, and that's why this is so hard. I feel like no matter what I do, I'm going to hurt you, and I'm trying to figure out which is the lesser evil."

Eika studies his expression silently, and he sees again the writer in her mulling over her words. "I want to tell you to do whatever you think is best," she says with a sad smile, "But honestly, I'd rather you didn't stay so far away from me. During those days at Anteiku, you helped me a lot, even if you didn't realize it." Tentatively, she holds out a hand, silently asking for permission. Ken stares at it, and then at her, and slowly, he raises one trembling hand and laces their fingers together.

It feels nice, he thinks, warm and soft. He can smell Eika strongly in here, where everything she interacts with daily has her scent imprinted on it, and it's comforting and familiar. He squeezes her hand and she squeezes back, gently. _She's real_ , he thinks, warmth blooming in his chest, _she's real._

"I want to return the favor and help you," Eika says.

Ken chuckles. "I'd never ask you to do something as impossible as fix me."

"I'm not going to _fix_ you," Eika argues, "You're not broken, Ken."

He almost laughs, but he's a little distracted by the fluttering of his heart. Back on a first name basis, picking up from where they left off.

"You're not," she insists, "You've just...got a crack or two. And I...I want to help you sand them out, and fill them in."

Ken smiles. "I thought you had a way with words, Miss Published Author."

"I do," she scoffs, "When they're written down and I've had time to revise them."

They share a laugh, soft and nervous.

Eika flexes her fingers a little bit and Ken lets go, watching a familiar, small smile appear on her face. "So how is this going to work?" she asks, sounding a bit like the nervous high school senior Ken remembers from Anteiku who picked at her nails and stole glances at him out of the corner of her eye.

"Slowly," Ken says, "One step at a time."

Eika nods. "You'll come back, right? I assume you don't really want to tell me where you're living now."

He shakes his head. "You don't want to come to where I live now. But I will come back here." He stands up from the bed and heads for the balcony, and he hears Eika trailing behind him. When he reaches the glass doors, he turns around and finds her gazing up at him patiently. He realizes, with a twinge of embarrassment, that this is the part where he would kiss her, if they were dating. Are they dating? He doesn't think so. At least, not technically. Neither of them have used that word, anyway.

He hesitates a moment too long and she laughs nervously, averting her gaze and stepping back from him. Ken catches her wrist impulsively to stop her, and then just holds it, unsure of how to proceed.

"Ken?" she asks softly.

He clears his throat and looks away. "Sorry," he says, "It's late. I should go."

"Okay."

Ken has done some extremely difficult, unpleasant things since he lost his humanity, most of which he chooses not to think about so he can sleep at night. He thinks, as he's running and a cold night breeze is hitting his face, inner voice a bit derisive, that one of the most difficult things has been letting go of Eika without giving her a kiss goodnight.

* * *

 **Welcome to Infuriatingly Slow Romance Between Bookworms, Part 2.**


	4. PS: Is This Too Forward?

**Sorry about disappearing suddenly! There was a medical emergency in the family, but everything is good now. Your regularly scheduled updates will now resume.**

* * *

Eika is only ten minutes into her research when she makes a startling discovery; ghouls can drink coffee.

She almost doesn't believe it at first and starts making a list of the references included at the end of the article, but the more she looks, the more information she finds to back it up. Roasted coffee beans are the one area of overlap in the diets of humans and ghouls, which she feels is a monumental find, but most scholarly articles are far more concerned with the properties of their predatory organs or notable characteristics of certain Rc levels, which is all very important, she's sure, but the coffee is what really holds her interest. She doesn't dwell on the _why_ so much, at least now, and she goes to check out the rest of the stack of books she didn't get around to reading yet, cramming them into her shoulder bag for later.

For now, she has something far more pressing to do.

It's been almost a week since Ken dropped back into her life, guilt for things he had no control over weighing heavily on his shoulders. He's come back to visit twice since, always at night, always using the balcony door, and he never has much to say, just that he wants to make sure she's doing alright. He stays for half an hour and sits on the edge of the bed, watching her read or write or do homework, and then he leaves without a word. He's so quiet that she sometimes forgets he's there, but she'll glance back over her shoulder and find him just staring, expression contemplative. She thinks he must be trying to figure out if he's awake or not, if she's real or not.

Someone does not go through what he did and come out okay. She knows he isn't by the way he loudly pops the joints of his fingers under his thumb, one at a time, gaze vacant, or from the terror on his face when she tried to give him a hug and he just froze up as though expecting something much worse.

 _There were his kagune, too, but she tries not to think about that part, how they hovered just over her skin, close enough that she felt heat radiating off of them, surface rippling as they changed before her eyes from a rounded end to a razor-sharp point._

 _Even with his hands squeezing around her throat and her eyes fluttering as she fought to stay conscious, she clearly remembers the way they looked. She really thought she was going to die, right there on that bench._

Eika stops at the supermarket and buys one of every coffee brand she can afford, laughing off the strange look the cashier gives her, and hurries back to her apartment. The books from Kamii's library join a host of others scattered across her dining room table, academic papers with titles such as, "Ghoul predatory habits in rural environments," and "Kagune cellular structure and respiration." Eika sets the coffee in a line on the counter and sits down to read, picking up one of the numerous papers about ghouls and coffee to look at.

She wonders if it would be weird if she offered him coffee the next time he came to visit. Would that be presumptuous? Does he even _like_ coffee? She almost regrets buying so much. Eika sets the paper down and rubs her temples tiredly; maybe she's overthinking things.

She's just afraid to lose him again, that's all. She doesn't want to do something stupid and scare him away, regardless of how strange that sounds. He's the ghoul, not her, but he'd looked terrified when he wrapped his hands around her throat, like he was desperately fighting against someone who wasn't there.

That's just like him, she thinks with a sad smile, that's really no different from the waiter she met at Anteiku not so long ago who was almost as timid as she was. But so many other things have changed, for both of them, and there's still more they need to know about each other. He's done his talking, and she knows she'll need to do hers at some point.

She's really dreading it.

* * *

"What's 'ero guro?'" Hinami asks innocently.

Ken pauses midway through putting a jacket on. Banjou is out mediating with the sixth ward's leaders and Tsukiyama is out getting food supplies, so no one else is around to intercept. Diplomatically, he asks, "Where did you hear that term?"

"It's on all of Sen Takatsuki's books," she says, "And on the one from Eika." Ken has _Zoo_ in his shoulder bag, intending to return it, though he's had it in his shoulder bag on his last two visits and never seems to bring it up.

"Ah." he chuckles. "Ero guro nonsense is the full name. It was a literary movement in the prewar. Takatsuki and Otsuichi's styles are vaguely reminiscent of it, so I'm sure it's a selling point for their work."

"Oh." Hinami frowns a little. It's clear she doesn't quite understand the words he just used, but Ken doesn't really want get into an in-depth discussion about grotesque eroticism with her, so he doesn't elaborate.

"I'll be back later tonight, like usual," he says as he puts his shoes on in the doorway, and Hinami sees him off with a wave and a cheerful smile. Out of the group, Hinami is the most interested in his relationship with Eika.

"Give her a hug," she says as though coaching him, "And tell her you really missed her! And give her a present." Ken indulges her, promising he'll do all of those things and smiling at her enthusiasm. He thinks Hinami must realize, if she's seen or smelled her before, that Eika is a human, but that doesn't seem to be a factor in her advice to Ken, something that keeps him hopeful about the future and the ghoul children growing up today.

The conversation keeps him occupied on his way over, wondering if his life might be a story straight out of the hedonistic prewar. It's a direct contradiction of his earlier hypothesis of his life being a postwar story— _he thinks that must be the case, surely, the antonym of the postwar is the prewar, and that's the least intuitive antonym he's ever thought of_ —but he thinks there must be something to it. It was sensational newspaper headlines of outrageous crimes that drove the ero guro nonsense movement; "Father abuses daughter and keeps her locked in storehouse for twenty years!" or "Couple decapitates and castrates disapproving father before committing double suicide!"

" _Woman disembowels man with intent to cannibalize, killed by falling steel beams."_

He shakes his head and laughs at the thought. His own headline was not nearly so exciting, but if someone had known the full story, he's sure it wouldn't have sounded so different.

He lands on Eika's balcony and peers in, surprised to see her moving around in the kitchen when she'd usually be hard at work at her desk. She startles when he knocks but the slight pout on her lips make him smile. "Do you climb, or do you just jump up here?" she asks curiously as she opens the sliding glass door, "I never hear anything."

"I'm very careful," he says vaguely, but he's distracted by a strong aroma wafting from the kitchen. "Are you making coffee?"

"Yes," Eika says, and then she blushes and breaks eye contact. Ken is confused for only a brief moment, about to ask if she has a project she intends to work on late into the night, when he realizes she's not making it for herself. "But I don't think it's very good," she says quickly as he shrugs off his shoulder bag and sets it on the bed, "I've never made it before today."

"I'm sure it's fine." He follows her into the kitchen and she reluctantly hands him a warm mug, steam curling off of the top. He smiles appreciatively and takes a sip.

He tries very hard not to wince.

"So?" Eika asks hopefully.

Ken maintains a smile.

"Is it any good?"

"It's…." Ken can't think of a positive word to use that wouldn't be a lie. Eika's smile falls when he hesitates too long.

"You stopped drinking. It's horrible, isn't it?"

"It's not _horrible,_ " he says, but she shakes her head.

"No, it's horrible. It smells way too strong, and it tastes a little odd." She pauses. "I wasn't sure if ghouls taste things the same way. I kind of hoped you wouldn't notice, honestly."

Ken chuckles. "We're especially sensitive to the quality of coffee," he says, "Maybe even more than humans."

"Oh."

"I can teach you sometime, if you want."

She smiles. "I'm sure you know how to make great coffee, considering where you worked before. I wanted to surprise you, or I would've asked. Some surprise, huh?"

"No, I still appreciate the gesture. How did you know ghouls could drink coffee?"

Eika looks away shyly. "I looked it up," she admits, "I've been doing a lot of research."

"I should've known. I bet you and Hide would've gotten along well." Ken only realizes what he's said once it's left his mouth, and then he falls silent, overwhelmed by a feeling of regret.

"Your friend?" Eika guesses.

Ken nods. He'd mentioned him the night he'd explained everything to Eika, but not by name. "Yeah. I still haven't...gotten around to seeing him."

The kitchen falls silent. Desperate to change the subject, Ken glances around the room and sees a pile of papers on ghoul research stacked on the counter, edges stained by coffee beans. Beneath them is a notepad, and Ken fishes it out curiously, turning back to the first page and seeing a letter in Eika's handwriting. " _Dear Ken Kaneki,"_ it says across the top, with a date several weeks earlier.

Eika lets out a soft gasp and reaches for it frantically, and Ken lets her grab it away from him. "You can't read these yet," she says, cheeks starting to turn pink.

"You wrote me a letter?"

"A lot of letters. I started doing them when I thought you were dead, but even when you came back, I kept writing more." She clutches the notepad tightly to her chest. "They're really embarrassing," she says, laughing a little, "I was just trying to make sense of you not being around anymore, and telling you things I never got to in person. I wrote letters when I had bad days to tell you about it, and I asked you what I should do."

Ken looks at her shaking hands and sees that the bandages have increased in number, wrapping all the way down her fingers and disappearing beneath her sleeves. "Bad days?"

"It feels strange to say that. You told me what happened to you, and my situation doesn't even compare…."

"What?" Reflexively, Ken cracks the joint in his left index finger to calm his nerves. "No, Eika, I don't want you comparing yourself to me. What happened to me wasn't normal. It shouldn't have happened."

 _I shouldn't have survived._

"I know it's not really fair," Eika says quietly, "Since you told me everything. Not just what happened recently, but...everything. I should tell you, too. But I can't yet."

"That's okay." He smiles reassuringly. "We don't have to do anything in a hurry, alright? I'm not going anywhere."

She regards him with a hint of doubt in her eyes, and then her gaze softens. She sets the notepad on the counter, sighing. "I'm supposed to be helping _you_ ," she says.

"I think it should go both ways."

"Well, yes, but…."

"What's the antonym of guilt?"

Eika is silent for a moment before her eyes shine with tears and she wipes at her face with her sleeve, smiling. "Pride."

* * *

"I finished _Zoo_ ," Ken says later. He keeps glancing at the clock, thinking he's overstayed his welcome, but Eika tells him not to worry.

"Which story was you favorite?"

"Ah, I liked most of them." He pauses to think. "'The White House in the Cold Forest,' if I had to pick just one."

"I knew you'd say that."

"Really?"

Eika nods. She's close, close enough that Ken is especially aware of her scent and her body heat, but not so close that the comfort turns to anxiety. They're sitting next to each other on her bed, looking out the balcony doors at the city lights in the dark. "That story reminds me of you," she says.

A boy— _who is not Ken, but sounds a lot like Ken, like the weak thing he was before_ —is taken in by his aunt and uncle, who force him to live in their horse stable where he shovels manure all day. His cousins are disgusted by him— _always getting better exam scores and making the rest of us look stupid, are you trying to pick a fight?_ —and during an "accident," he ends up with a serious injury that leaves him horribly disfigured. He's kicked out and he goes to live alone in the forest, and when the winter comes— _he picks off the fools stupid enough to wander into his territory one by one, strips them bare and builds a house with their bodies, a pale house in a cold forest._

 _He, child of the black goat, feared nothing and no one any longer, because nothing could hurt him with his armor forged of those he devoured, the legacy of the centipede that ate through anything standing in its way nestled deep inside of him._

"I should probably be offended," Ken says, "The protagonist is a monster, after all. But I agree with you."

"He's not a monster," Eika says, sounding offended, "He was treated horribly and he did the best he could. He was kind to those who were kind to him, though."

Ken doesn't reply for a moment. "What do you think happened to him after the ending?"

He sees Eika glance at him out of the corner of his eye. "I don't know," she says, "The ending seemed a bit ambiguous. But I think…."

A police siren starts up somewhere in the distance, and they both watch the red lights dancing in the dark as it flies down the street.

"His story was probably a tragedy," Ken says.

Eika nods silently.

"What about you?" he asks, turning to look at her, "Which one was your favorite?"

"The first one, 'Zoo.' It doesn't really make me think of anything in particular, I just like the way it was done."

"Really? I didn't like it all that much. It felt unfinished."

Eika shrugs. "I think it's supposed to feel like that."

"Hm." Ken thinks about giving the book back. He scoots a little closer to her, trying to reach his shoulder bag on her other side, but ends up stopping. Eika is completely still, watching him closely. Their thighs are touching, and Ken can feel it every time she exhales, the air brushing against his lips. He almost moves away again, but he doesn't really want to. "Is 'Zoo' a tragedy?" he asks.

Eika doesn't answer at first, then looks surprised, as though she didn't realize he spoke. "'Zoo?'" she repeats. Ken can hear her heart beating rapidly, see the blood rushing to her face. He really wants to do something—hug her, Hinami had said, and he wants to, he wants to never, ever let go, _wants to wrap around her like a centipede loops around its mate and take her with him so he knows no one can hurt her_ —but instead he clenches the bed sheets in both hands, knuckles white. "I don't think so. People realize something in a tragedy, don't they? They come to terms with something, and that helps the audience reach catharsis, too." She shakes her head. "The protagonist in 'Zoo' never reaches that point. Or rather, he actively avoids it."

"Maybe he knows," Ken whispers, "He knows that learning the truth would make it a tragedy, and he doesn't want that."

He sees Eika studying his face. "What…?"

"Do you think that's all it takes?" Ken asks, "For someone to keep their story from becoming a tragedy? Ignorance? As long as the characters don't ever achieve a full understanding of what's happened, if they just ignore it and pretend that everything's okay, then they'll be alright?"

Eika swallows, and he sees the way the muscles in her throat move. "It can't go on like that forever," she says, "Any good fictional world isn't stagnant. There are other characters who act and discover things. Eventually, the protagonist is going to be forced to understand and accept what happened."

"I don't want that." Ken clutches her shoulders with shaking hands, buries his face in her throat and takes a deep breath. She smells vaguely of coffee, a little bitter, a little sweet, like musty books and old ink, like home, if home is somewhere Ken invents right that second, a place he's never been to but wants to see. "I don't want it to be a tragedy," he says hoarsely.

"Ken," Eika says, and she hesitates for a long time before he feels her hands wrapping around him, loosely, reluctantly.

She is _real_ , he tells himself, she is real even if nothing else is. Yamori is dead and he dug the centipede out of his ear, but he still hears and sees both of them sometimes, still wakes up in that room and smells stale blood in the air, reliving his mistakes and his regrets over and over again. Sometimes, he hears a voice he mistakes for Rize's in the back of his mind, and he realizes it's just his own, but that just makes it worse.

But Eika is real; she lingers even after the visions and the voices stop.

"Ken, you think your life is a tragedy?"

He shudders. "I know it is."

"No," Eika says firmly, "It's not."

"Then what is it?"

 _It's a fucking mess, that's what it is. It's one hopeless situation after another, fatal flaws eating people away from the inside out, captives of circumstance and cruelty, blood raining down on everything he's ever held precious to him, stained by his own fingers and vanishing into the red._

"We'll think of something," Eika says to him, but he doesn't hear her.

Ken stays the night, curled up on Eika's bed and refusing to let go of her for fear that she, too, will disappear if he does.


	5. PS: You Can't Avoid This Forever

Ken drags home just before sunrise, flips on the light in the living room, and finds all of his housemates waiting for him.

"You're back!" Hinami cries, jumping up from the couch to wrap her arms around him. One of his hands shoots out to catch the door and keep his balance.

"What are you doing up at this hour?" he asks, regretting just how groggy his words sound when he's half-asleep himself.

Hinami lets go of him and looks down at her feet guiltily. "You said you would come back, so when you didn't, I got worried."

"I'm sorry, Hinami," Ken says gently, "I didn't mean to worry you." He looks up at Banjou and Tsukiyama behind her, hoping for a bit backup to assure her he's fine, but they're both staring at him.

"Did things go okay with Eika?" Hinami asks eagerly, "Did you make up?"

"I'd say things went well," Tsukiyama mutters, a knowing smile growing on his face.

Ken is confused for only a moment before he begins putting it all together; sneaking home early in the morning looking bedraggled, no doubt smelling strongly of human. Banjou almost looks embarrassed for him.

"Look," he says sternly, "We just talked."

Tsukiyama nods sagely. "I'm sure you did."

"That's all we did."

"I believe you."

"It's fine," Banjou says, looking away as if embarrassed for him, "I mean, it's not really our business."

"We just can't help but notice you snuck home early in the morning," Tsukiyama goes on, "Looking bedraggled. Reeking of human."

Hinami frowns, glancing between the two of them before she looks once more at Ken with worry. "Did you fight again?"

Tsukiyama opens his mouth to answer and Ken cuts him off with a firm, "No. We didn't. And we're not going to discuss this anymore. Banjou is right, it's not your business."

Tsukiyama shrugs, seemingly content to let it go for the time being, though Ken doubts this'll be the last he hears of it. Hinami stops him on his way to his room with a tug on his sleeve. "I don't understand what they were talking about," she says, sounding upset, "Is Eika okay? You sure you didn't have another fight?"

"We didn't fight," Ken says, "I promise. We talked about books and coffee and nice things like that. There wasn't any fighting at all."

She lets out a breath and smiles. "I'm glad. I bet Eika is glad you come to visit, since she doesn't have parents anymore."

Ken pauses. "She what?" He turns, giving Hinami his full attention. "Hinami, where did you hear that?"

"On TV," she says, "They said her name and talked about a book she wrote, but they used really big words, so I didn't understand the whole thing." She frowns. "What's a 'scandal?'"

* * *

"Are you going to write a book about ghouls?"

Eika looks up in surprise at the library assistant behind the desk, a girl a few years older at Kamii who checks out Eika's books most days.

"Sorry, I just assumed," she goes on with a laugh, "You're always looking up stuff about them, so I wondered."

"I hadn't really thought about it," Eika admits, "But that'd be interesting."

"You should do a murder mystery!" the assistant says excitedly, "I'd definitely read it. It can be about a pair of detectives chasing a mass-murdering ghoul, and in the climax, there's a super dramatic battle on the rooftop! And the ghoul can have a human love interest to make him more likable."

They share a laugh, though between the two of them, Eika's is softer.

"I guess that's too unbelievable."

"Really?"

"Well, yeah. Why would a ghoul be with a human? It would just eat them, wouldn't it?"

Eika's smile falters. "Would it?"

"I don't know why not." The assistant pauses, looking at the computer screen in front of them. "Ah, sorry. The book you're looking for is already checked out."

"That's alright. I'll still look around," Eika says, hurriedly excusing herself from the counter.

Eika is under the impression that most people don't know what ghouls actually look like. Even the experts who come on late night talk shows, the same kinds of people who are writing the academic papers she reads, talk about ghouls like they're incomprehensible monsters, only ever mentioning predatory organs and hunting patterns and never mentioning that they look just like humans. If she hadn't seen Ken's kagune, she might still be in disbelief.

She runs her hands along the spines of books in the biology section's collection of ghoul-related texts, trying not to let what the library assistant said bother her. She's seen a ghoul first hand—he spent the night huddled next to her, crying—and she isn't under the impression that he only comes around to figure out when he can eat her. There were times when she'd been a little concerned, or startled, but who wouldn't have been?

Her hand bumps into someone else's, and she draws back in shock. There's another student beside her, eyes widening slightly in surprise. She glances down at the books he's holding; _Tokyo Underground: The Hidden World of Ghouls_ and _A Comparative Study of Elevated Rc Cell Count in Humans_.

"Sorry," he says with a laugh, "Didn't see you there."

"N-no, that was my bad," Eika says stammers, "I wasn't paying attention."

"You've got a term paper on ghouls, too?"

"Oh, no, it's just," she pauses, reluctant to say _personal interest_ for some reason, "I guess I'm planning on writing a book about them at some point."

"Really?" He blinks, studying her face. "Hold on, you're from the lit department, right? I've seen your face on TV! You wrote that memoir."

She looks away in embarrassment. "Ah. Yeah. Are you a lit major, too? I don't think we've ever met."

"Nah, I'm not. I know a few people who are through a mutual friend, though." His tone becomes a bit somber. Curiously, Eika meets his gaze.

"Really?" she asks, "Who is it? Maybe I know him, too."

The young man smiles, but it's lost the warmth it had when he first spoke. There's a suspicious edge to it now. "I never said it was a he."

Eika swallows nervously. "Oh, sorry," she says, and tries to laugh it off, "I just assumed, I guess. Most of my friends in the department are guys, so..." She trails off when his expression doesn't change.

"You're really interested in ghouls, right?" he asks, "We should get together and share notes sometime."

"That sounds good. I'm Ishihara, Eika, by the way."

He grins, but Eika can't help but feel that something is off. "I'm Nagachika, Hideyoshi," he says, "It's nice to finally meet you, Ishihara."

* * *

Ken is anxious to go back to Eika's all day and can hardly wait until the sun sets, but he finds her frowning when he arrives and is immediately overwhelmed with worry. "What's wrong?" he asks the moment he shuts the balcony door behind him.

She's sitting at her desk, a few new books about ghoul metabolism piled beside handwritten notes in front of her. "I ran into someone you know today," she says carefully.

Ken's eyes narrow. "Who?"

"Nagachika."

He lets out a relieved sigh. "Oh. How was he?"

"Fine." Eika chews on her lip.

"Did something happen?" he asks.

"I've never met him before, but he knew who I was. And that I knew you."

"I mentioned you to him when I still worked at Anteiku."

"I think he's convinced that I have something to do with your disappearance."

Ken frowns. "What?"

"I ran into him at Kamii's library and we were looking at the same books," Eika says, "We talked at length about ghouls, and about you without really using your name. I think he knows I'm in contact with you; he seemed suspicious."

He nods, mulling it over. He'd known it was possible that Eika and Hide would run into each other eventually, but he hadn't thought Hide would have any reason to be suspicious of her. "I wouldn't worry," he says after a moment, "Hide doesn't mean any harm."

"Ken, you can't just brush this off," she insists, "You've put me in a really uncomfortable position. I have to lie to your best friend's face every time I see him. He asked me, 'Ishihara, you take things like disappearances seriously, don't you?' and he showed me a missing persons poster. Yours, specifically."

"I'm going to go see him."

"When?" Eika presses. "You can't leave me between the two of you, that's not fair to me or to him."

"Soon, alright?" Ken says exasperatedly, "I'll go soon. This isn't easy for me. I didn't want this to happen, Eika, I didn't want him to be suspicious of you, and I sure as hell didn't want to leave in the first place."

He stops when he hears her heartbeat louder, drowning out the sound of her breathing, and he glances up to find her on her feet, taking another step back from him.

"Your...kagune…." she stammers.

Ken blinks, confused, until he realizes he has a couple extra appendages flaring out at his sides. He quickly pulls them back beneath his jacket. "Sorry," he says, "I didn't…."

"It's okay."

She doesn't come any closer.

 _It's not okay. It is absolutely not okay. As if he needed another reminder that he's a monster now, that his first reflex when he's in emotional distress is to fight rather than to flee._

"I guess it happens sometimes," he tries to explain, "Nobody ever says anything, because I'm not usually around humans, so it's not weird to them."

 _Except it is. Banjou always get distracted when they talk about ward politics when suddenly Ken can't control his own kagune, and he quietly points it out. He thinks that must be why his appetite has been bothering him so much lately. Eika has never asked about it; he assumes she just wants to avoid thinking about it, and he's fine with that. But he would never eat her. He's sure of that._

 _He eats on his way to visit her just to be sure._

"Eventually, we'll have to talk about it," Eika says quietly, "But I'll cover for you for a little bit."

Ken nods appreciatively, seating himself on the edge of her bed. Eventually, she comes to sit beside him, but she doesn't meet his eyes. "They're still out," he says to break the silence, turning his back to her. "You can touch, if you want."

"I thought you—?"

"I changed my mind."

 _I don't want you to be afraid of me._

Ken holds his breath, waiting, but he still startles slightly when he feels Eika's hands trailing over the fabric of his jacket. "Sorry," she says, "Could you…?"

Wordlessly, he unzips it and shrugs it off of his shoulders, exposing the backless battle suit underneath. He hears Eika's sharp intake of breath when the air hits his exposed skin.

"Do they go under your skin?" she whispers.

"Yeah. It just takes me a minute to get them back in."

"Is that normal?"

Ken inhales and holds it for a moment. "No."

"So...I can…."

"Yeah. Go ahead."

Once, Ken found his own kagune disgusting and he avoided looking at them if he could. But he's come to appreciate them as necessary parts of his own anatomy, as useful as an arm or a leg, and he's spent a little bit of time looking at himself in the mirror with them curling over his shoulders for inspection.

Eika's touches are feather-light and hesitant, fingertips skimming anxiously over the rinkaku scales. At some point, he has to stop her and reaches back, gently closing his fingers around her wrist. "Sorry, but could you go the other way?" he asks, and he feels even more ridiculous saying it out loud when she meets his gaze over his shoulder and looks confused. "It's just...it's sort of unpleasant if you go towards the kakuhou."

"Towards the…?" She thinks for a minute. He almost explains, but he realizes she must have read about it by now. "Oh. Like a snake?"

"What?"

"Snakes are like that, aren't they?" Eika asks, blushing a bit in embarrassment, "If you pet them the wrong way, they don't like it."

"Ah. Sure." He doesn't really know, but he nods anyway. Eika doesn't seem afraid anymore, which is the whole point of this. He feels her hand slide down his kagune moving away from his body and relaxes a little.

"I didn't think it would be so smooth," she says quietly, and pulls her hand away.

Ken frowns a little and one of his rinkaku uncurls, draping itself over her lap. Eika doesn't do anything right away.

"Um. Did you not want me to stop?"

He's too embarrassed to look at her. "It's relaxing."

He knows she's trying to hide her laughter, but his hearing is good enough to pick it up anyway, and he feels heat rising to his face. He forgets about his discomfort when she begins "petting" his kagune again, hand repeatedly smoothing over his scales. Ken is just beginning to let his eyes slide shut when he remembers he came for a reason and clears his throat. "I actually wanted to ask you something."

"Okay."

"It's about your parents."

Eika's hand stops momentarily. Ken's rinkaku gives an irritated shake—he swears it was the rinkaku and not him that time, not consciously—and she resumes petting it. "What about them?"

"I was hoping you'd tell me."

"Did you hear about it on TV?"

 _Close enough,_ he decides. "Yeah."

Eika lets out a heavy sigh. "Like I said, I feel a guilty talking about my problems when yours are so much worse."

"And I said I didn't want you to think about it that way."

"Right." She still hesitates. "It happened after the memoir came out. I got my first televised interview and people were asking about the first few chapters, where I talked about my life at home. My parents saw it, and it upset them."

"Why?"

"You haven't read the book yet," Eika says quietly, "When you do, you'll see why."

Ken turns around, wanting to meet her eyes despite missing her warmth when his rinkaku slides out of her hand. "I remember," he says, reaching for her hands but stopping short of them, waiting for her to pull away if she wants, "You had bruises on your wrists and arms."

"You saw?" She holds out a hand and Ken gently takes it with both of his, fingers running over the bandages.

"Yeah." He looks up at her. "So what happened after the interview?"

Eika holds his gaze for a long time and he sees tears starting to form in the corners of her eyes just before she looks away. "My dad committed suicide, and my mom blamed me for it. She said I should never have told anyone. I haven't seen her since she helped me move in here."

Ken is speechless for a while, and he can feel his kagune moving restlessly on the bed behind him. He doesn't ask what exactly happened to her before—what was done to her—because he doesn't think he can handle hearing it right now. Instead, he leans forward and embraces her, and rather than going rigid, Eika relaxes against him.

"They're warm, too," she mumbles.

Ken realizes four of his rinkaku are wrapped around her and is already apologizing as he begins to retract them, but Eika reaches up and holds the one on her shoulder where it is.

She smiles a little when she tells him, "I don't mind."

* * *

 **I promise there will be more to this than Ken and Eika feeling bad separately and then hugging to make it better. Enjoy it while it's still simple.**


	6. PS: What If You Don't Come Back?

"They want me to make an appearance with Sen Takatsuki."

"Oh?" Ken says.

He must sound distracted, because Eika glances up from the notes she's scribbling and looks at him.

"The station wants to interview young writers," she continues, "But I'm a little nervous. She's so talented and she has so many works to her name. All I've got is the memoir." It's another weekend night for them spent in the quiet of Eika's room, him on the edge of the bed and her hard at work at her desk.

"A very well-written memoir." He can say that now that he's started reading it. He hasn't gotten very far yet, though, because he only ever gets through a few pages at a time before he needs to run back to Eika's and make sure she's alright.

" _Every household has its own codes and rituals. Regarding my family, there were some things that we simply chose to ignore. I didn't have to be taught this explicitly; I learned it on my own by observing my mother._

 _Like one cast into the role of the_ shite _in a Noh play, we donned expressive masks that seemed to change in the light, so that even the most discerning eye would not realize that it was not our true face."_

"Something's been bothering me lately," Ken admits, "I think that I won't be able to visit you as often soon."

The disappointment shows on Eika's face and it hurts to see her like that, but she puts on a brave smile a moment later.

 _A mask_ , he thinks.

"That's alright," she says, "Even if it's not as often, we'll still find time to see each other."

"What I'm worried about is your safety in my absence. Not that I don't trust you to take care of yourself," he adds when he sees her start to frown, "But I really have put you in danger by coming here as often as I do. I don't want another ghoul targeting you because of me."

"Another ghoul?" Eika abandons her homework, turning her chair to give him her full attention. "You're the only ghoul I've ever seen. Are there all that many in Tokyo?"

"They're good at hiding." He gets to his feet and holds out a hand. "Come on."

"What?" She reaches out and lets him pull her to her feet.

"Have you ever taken a self-defense course?"

Eika looks away sheepishly. "Ah. No."

"That's alright." Ken smiles. "You're in luck, you've got a great teacher right here."

She laughs. "Since when are you qualified to teach self-defense?"

Ken hesitates. There are a lot of answers to that question. Since he received an implant that rendered his body impenetrable to all but material made of Rc cells? Since his coworkers at Anteiku beat him to a bloody pulp every afternoon until he was fast enough to keep up? _Since he practically fucking ate the person responsible for making him what he is now?_

He decides to just shrug and say, "I've picked up a few tricks lately."

When she straightens to her full height in front of him, expression expectant as she waits for him to say something, he feels another wave of fear crashing against him. The human body is so frail; the flesh too soft to withstand much pressure, the limbs as easy as twigs to snap, the organs too weak to recover from serious trauma. They aren't meant to fight ghouls, aren't meant to win. Eika and Hide are not as strong as he is, and knowing that he can only be in one place at a time makes him worry more.

"Ken?" Eika urges. It's a shame, he thinks, that she's gotten so good at being able to tell when he's just lost in thought and when his anxieties are beginning to consume him.

"I'm sorry," he says quietly, "I wish I could just trust the world to be kind."

 _But I don't see why it would change now._

* * *

In 'Zoo,' Eika's favorite story from the book of the same name, the protagonist keeps getting photos of his girlfriend's corpse in the mail.

Before, when Eika mentioned it, he just said it felt unfinished to him; he didn't mention the nightmares he'd had after he read it. Something about the narrative style really stuck with him, the hopelessness and the hurt, and he found himself obsessing over it, wondering what he would do if it were him in the protagonist's place. Eika came to his mind immediately—she did most of the time, these days—and he imagined the agony he'd feel if she suddenly vanished, the crushing agony of not knowing. After the first photo would come, his sole purpose would be to find whoever was sending them and tie them to a chair, _break every bone in their body, chop off their fingers and toes, carve into their flesh, force feed them insects, jam a centipede into their ear and watch them squirm, but don't let them die for days, for weeks, even, as long as he can help it._

'Zoo' is a tragedy that starts halfway through the story, when everything has already gone wrong and all that's left is to get revenge and reach catharsis, but even that doesn't matter anymore.

If she were already dead, revenge wouldn't bring her back.

* * *

He teaches her how to break out of grabs, from the back or from the side—from the wrist, and he only realizes his mistake when she inhales sharply as he roughly grabs one, and the session is derailed for a few minutes while he apologizes and berates himself for being stupid. Eika learns quickly, and Ken chooses to focus on that rather than the reality, which is that an actual attacker won't be so gentle, or might use a kagune instead of a less flexible limb.

"Next weekend," he says, "There's something I have to do, so I won't be able to see you."

Eika nods and reaches out, waiting the customary half second before she places her hand on Ken's shoulder. "I'll be alright," she says.

He looks away.

"Ken, you just taught me what to do. I'll be fine."

"I'd feel better," he admits, "If you were with people I knew would look out for you." He weighs his options; his first instinct was to send her to Anteiku, but then he'd have to explain that he wanted her to stay for the weekend, and that would raise far too many questions, not to mention putting her again between himself and the people he's avoiding. He's been putting off the other option for a while now, but he thinks it's the simpler of the two. "If it's alright, would you feel comfortable staying at my place next weekend?"

She looks surprised. "I don't really mind, but I didn't think you'd be okay with that."

"I won't be there," he says, "But my roommates will be. I'll send one of them to pick you up after you get out of class on Friday."

"Are they…." Eika pauses, considering her wording, "Are your roommates also ghouls?"

"Yes," he says, carefully watching her expression. "But you have nothing to fear from them. I trust them."

Well, most of them. He's going to have to have a talk with Tsukiyama.

She looks uneasy, but she says, "Then I guess I'll trust your judgment."

"I'm sorry. I wouldn't put you through this is if I didn't think it was necessary."

"It's alright." She goes to her desk, gathering up the loose papers and organizing them in stacks. He distinctly sees a pile with his name at the top. "You're not the only one who worries, you know."

"You're still writing letters?"

"I never stopped."

"I'm here now," he says softly, "You can talk to me."

"I do," she promises, gaze drawn to the pages of handwritten notes, "Most of what I write down is things I've already said. It just makes me feel better." She turns them over so he can't read them when he draws closer and meets his eyes. "What if you don't come back," she says, "And the letters are all I have?"

Ken shakes his head. "Believe me, Eika, I will come back."

She smiles sadly, and Ken recognizes it now as another mask, the careful placement of a smile where it shouldn't be to ease the tension. "I believe you," she says, "But I don't trust the world, either."

* * *

Just when interest in Eika begins to fade from the house in the 6th ward, Hinami immediately announces to the others that she'll be appearing on TV alongside her favorite author. Despite him being almost certain that they all have better things to do, the four of them end up crammed on the couch in the living room in the evening, Hinami eagerly holding the remote and adjusting the volume as necessary.

"She's had a lot of TV appearances now, hasn't she?" Banjou says, "That's impressive, both for her age and for having only her memoir out. I wonder if she ever gets tired of talking about it?"

"Certainly not," Tsukiyama scoffs, "Eika is an artist, isn't she? A true artist never tires of discussing their work with the layman to help his understanding."

Ken shoots him a sharp glare. "You should call her by her last name, Tsukiyama," he warns, "You've never met her before, and I'm sure you don't want to come off as rude."

The Gourmet frowns. "I don't believe Hinami has met her, either."

"But I've seen her before," Hinami insists, "And Ken and I talk about her, so I feel like we've met." A cell phone commercial ends and a shot of the interview program's studio fills the screen. "There she is!" Hinami says excitedly when the camera pans to the guests sitting opposite the host.

A banner stretched across the bottom of the screen, reading, "Young Authors: Eika Ishihara and Sen Takatsuki," and Ken feels himself smiling with pride.

"It's funny, this is actually the first time we're meeting," Sen laughs, "Even though I've heard so much about Miss Ishihara."

Eika flushes, clearly embarrassed, and stammers out a response about being honored to meet her.

"She looks nervous," Banjou says.

Ken nods. "She's shy anyway, and Takatsuki is a bit eccentric."

"I can't hear!" Hinami complains.

The interviewer asks a question about the literary themes in the memoir, and Sen commandeers the conversation. "I thought the use of Noh imagery was particularly interesting," she says, "I'm under the impression you're very well-read."

"Not necessarily," Eika laughs nervously, "But I'd read Fumiko Enchi's _Masks_ a little bit before I started writing, so it was really fresh in my mind."

"Oh, _Masks_? That makes sense. The structure is like a Noh play there, too."

"It's something I've become really interested in," Eika confesses, "I want to write fiction next time, and I think that'll show up as a motif again."

"I'd love to see you write fiction!" Sen exclaims, startling Eika, "Don't take this the wrong way, Miss Ishihara, but your memoir really reads more like fiction; so many incredible things happen. I think such an interesting person should really write fiction to fully explore the corners of their own mind."

"Th-thank you," Eika stammers, seemingly overwhelmed at the praise.

Hinami glances up at Ken. "What's _Masks_ about?" she asks.

He shakes his head. "I'm not sure. I haven't read it."

"We should go buy it!"

Ken chuckles and nods in agreement.

"You seem to be doing well," Sen notes, "Better than before, I mean. Like something good happened recently."

Ken's heart skips a beat when he sees Eika blush, looking down at her hands in her lap. "Something good did happen recently," she says quietly, "It's a secret, though."

"There you go again!" Sen exclaims, "You don't have to be mysterious all the time, you know!"

The studio audience laughs and Eika chuckles a bit.

Ken can feel his housemates looking at him knowingly, and though he feels self-conscious, he also feels content, a little more convinced that going to Eika was not the wrong thing to do.

* * *

" _It was then that I saw the young man whose face reminded me of the_ doji _mask, one of beauty and mystery with delicate features and a shy smile. I tried to deceive him with the mask of_ ko-omote _, one of immaturity and naivety, but he was not fooled. He looked carefully at my books rather than my face, and in time, he learned to read my intentions. Slowly, my mask began to crack in his presence and my performance faltered. I was afraid._

 _But it was a wonderful fear nonetheless."_


	7. PS: What Were You Thinking Then?

_Though a fine art aficionado may take issue with such a simplistic view, I am of the opinion that Noh theater, at its core, revolves primarily around the story of two roles—that of the_ waki _and the_ shite _. The_ waki _is the itinerant monk or the intrepid traveler, one who makes a stop along their journey only to bear witness to something tragic long after the tragedy has unfolded. The_ shite _begins as a soft-spoken and melancholy stranger who is strangely familiar with the misfortunes of the area, but reveal themselves to the_ waki _as a lingering spirit bound to the place of their suffering. It is then that the_ waki _takes pity and with gentle assurances and Buddhist prayer, they free the_ shite _from that which binds them, setting them free at last._

 _Noh theater is the art of the post-tragedy, the upheaval of buried history and ancient misery beheld by new eyes. It is a second catharsis, a funeral for ghosts. The_ shite's _second death and the_ waki's _departure leaves the stage empty, but the audience is left with a feeling of tranquility and satisfaction. Noh fills the space left in the wake of a tragedy by bridging the gap between the dead and the living, and allows two distinct worlds to meet, if only for the briefest of moments._

* * *

"I'm thinking about writing another book," Eika says conversationally.

Kazuichi Banjou, who she met just an hour earlier, looks a bit startled when she speaks up but manages a nod and asks, "Oh yeah? What about?"

They're across from each other in a sparsely populated train car, Eika seated with her back to the window and Banjou standing by the door she faces. He hasn't come any closer than just within arm's reach the entire time they've been together, from meeting in the park to the walk to the station or even as they squeezed through crowds to transfer to another line and he had to look back and make sure she was still following. Eika wonders why.

"Noh theater," she says, "I wrote a paper about it for a class not too long ago. It was supposed to just be a short personal essay, but I got a little carried away. I feel like I really need to write something in the same spirit."

"Huh." Banjou is tall, towering over Eika with a pensive frown on his face as he looks past her and out the window at the scenery flying by. If he were a stranger, she'd probably keep her distance and avoid making eye contact, but this is someone who has Ken's trust, so she does her best to pretend she's relaxed.

* * *

" _Banjou is the best choice," Ken had told her several nights ago, "Because he's h_ _ad the fewest encounters with the CCG. He won't attract their attention if he goes to meet you on his own."_

 _Eika had paused at the word "encounters," wondering what that entailed, though she suspected Ken would be hesitant to tell her. "This seems like a lot of trouble," she told him, "Are you sure you don't want to just give me the address? I'm sure I'll be able to find it."_

 _She didn't quite have all of the words out when one of Ken's hands shot out and took hold of her shoulder, sudden enough to startle her, grip hard enough to make her wince. "No," he said, sounding almost panicked, "No, it's fine, it's not a bother. Banjou won't mind."_

 _His fingers were trembling. Eika gently touched his wrist. "Ken, are you okay?" she asked._

" _Yes," he said stiffly, and it wasn't the first time that she felt ridiculous for even asking._

 _She couldn't remember what "okay" was anymore, not for either of them._

* * *

The sun is just beginning to set on the 6th ward, plunging the city into twilight. Eika follows Banjou out of the train station and down the street a few blocks, passing a small cafe. Her pace slows a bit when she glances through the shop window and she catches a glimpse of a couple sitting at one of the tables, laughing over their coffee.

"We go there a lot," Banjou says, glancing at her over his shoulder, "Ken really likes the place. I think it reminds him of Anteiku."

"Oh." Eika hurries to catch up to him, though she spares one last glance back at the cafe. "Has he not been back to Anteiku yet?"

"Ah. No," Banjou says uneasily, "He's just...now's not a good time."

Ken's new home is a modern two-story house nestled in the suburbs of the 6th ward, looking innocuous with a bicycle leaning against the front wall and potted plants on the upstairs balcony. "Is this your house?" Eika asks curiously.

Banjou looks surprised for a moment, fumbling for the keys to the front door in his pocket. "Uh, no," he says, "Tsukiyama's paying for this, actually. We all just crash here for now." Before he can find his keys, Eika hears little footsteps on the other side of the door before it opens just a crack, enough that she can see a child peering up at her from inside.

"She's here!" the girl exclaims happily, throwing the door open and stepping aside to let them in.

Eika comes into the entryway and slips off her shoes, glancing at the girl. "You must be Hinami," she says.

"Did Ken tell you about me?"

"He did. He said you like to read."

The girl's face lights up and she excitedly drags Eika down the hall and into the living room, where a pair of couches and an armchair are situated around a glass coffee table. A baseball game plays on the TV mounted on the wall, and one of the couches is occupied by three people around Eika's age, faces similar enough that she assumes them to be siblings. "Sorry to intrude," Eika says weakly, settling onto the couch across from them beside Hinami, who's begun sifting through the pile of books on the table in front of her.

"You're not intruding," one of the siblings says with a wave of his hand, "You're a guest. I'm Ichimi, by the way. This is Jiro and Sante," and he gestures at the boy on his left and the girl on his right.

"We actually wanted to go along to pick you up," Sante pipes up, "But Kaneki said it would be better if just Banjou went."

"Eika," Banjou calls, peering into the living room from the hall, "Did you want something to eat or drink?"

"Just some tea is fine," she tells him.

"Anything else? I figured I'd make a trip to the store now and get whatever you need for the rest of the weekend."

Eika blinks in confusion. "You don't need to do that," she says, "Whatever you have is fine; I'm not picky."

Across from her, the siblings glance at each other. "Uh, we don't have anything," Jiro murmurs.

"What? Why….?" It suddenly occurs to her that everyone in the house—from the three teenagers on the sofa across from her to the tall man in the hall to the little girl beside her—is a ghoul. "Oh," she says, face flushing in embarrassment. "Sorry, I didn't think…."

"Eika," Hinami whispers, though not loudly quietly enough to make the words go unheard by everyone else in the room, "You know we're all ghouls, right?"

The silence that follows is almost deafening. "Yes," Eika says quickly, catching Ichimi's gradually widening eyes, "I knew already."

"Oh," Ichimi sighs, visibly relieved, "I mean, yeah, I figured Kaneki would've told you by now, but...I dunno, sometimes it's hard to tell what he's thinking."

"Of course he told her," Hinami says with a frown, "Eika's really important to him."

"Wh-what," Eika stammers, feeling heat rising to her face, "What do you mean it's hard to tell what he's thinking?"

Ichimi glances at her warily. "Exactly that," he says, "I have a hard time keeping up with him. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy, but sometimes he gets all worked up and doesn't really think clearly, and I worry a little bit. It's been a lot worse since he…."

Sante jabs her brother in the side with her elbow, hissing, "Come on, she doesn't need to hear all that."

"No, please," Eika urges, "If there's something I should know about, I'd like to hear it."

"I don't think Kaneki would appreciate being discussed being his back," she hears, and turns to see a stranger approaching from further in the house, tall and slender, hair neatly combed out of his eyes and a somewhat sinister smile on his lips. He pauses when he comes into the room, freezing mid-stride and looking her over carefully, and his smile widens. "Goodness, Kaneki's certainly left his scent all over you," he says, "I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. He tends to smell like you when he finally comes back from seeing you."

"I wanted to read a book with Eika," Hinami says impatiently, irritated by all of the interruptions.

"We can do that in just a minute," Eika says, though she turns to the newcomer in the room, "You're Tsukiyama, right?"

The corners of his lips twitch slightly, though Eika can't tell by his rigid posture whether he was about to smile or scowl. "Yes, that's right. And you're Eika Ishihara; Kaneki's told us plenty about you."

"I don't want to talk behind his back," she insists, "But I'm worried about Ken. I wondered if something had happened recently."

"If he hasn't told you yet, then I doubt he wants us to say anything."

Eika frowns tightly. "If he's hurt, or if he's in some kind of danger…."

"What would you do about it?" Tsukiyama asks, "Even if we told you everything, what do you think you could actually do?"

She's offended for a moment before she takes in the worried faces of the other ghouls around her. _These are all people Ken trusts, people who just want to help him and protect him,_ she thinks, gaze softening, _And unlike me, they actually have the power to do so._

"You're right," she says quietly, "If he wanted me to know, he would've told me."

No one speaks for a moment, and the words settle over Eika's shoulders, an uncomfortable weight that reminds her of just how little she really knows about Ken. The baseball game playing on the TV behind her continues through the silence, the commentator's excited cries all blurring together into faint background noise. Ichimi and his siblings try to keep their eyes on the screen, unsure of what to say, and Tsukiyama lingers a moment looking conflicted before he disappears into a room down the hall and shuts the door behind him.

Eika glances to the side and finds Hinami staring down at her reflection in the coffee table. "Hinami," she says softly, startling the younger girl, "How about we read a book?"

"Do you still want to?" Hinami asks.

"Of course I do."

Hinami smiles a bit and begins to rummage through the stack of books again. "You don't think the Flower Man is mean, do you?" she asks, "He really isn't. He's just nervous. I bet it's because you're human, and we've met lots of bad humans." She stops what she's doing to look up at Eika. "They've hurt us a lot," she says, "I don't have a mom or a dad anymore because of bad humans. I didn't even know there were good ones before, but Ken promised there were. And he was right!"

Eika swallows the lump in her throat when Hinami turns away, pulling a notebook and pencil from the bottom of the book pile and opening to a page somewhere in the middle. "I know you're good," Hinami says, "Not just because Ken said so. I can tell that you're not like the bad ones."

"Hinami, I," Eika starts to say, the words spilling out before she can even decide if she wants to express her condolences or change the subject, and chokes on a sob. Hinami's smile falls and concern overtakes her features.

"What's wrong?" she asks.

"You...I just…." Eika wraps her arms around Hinami, pulling her into her chest, and squeezes her eyes shut, but a few tears still escape.

"Why're you crying?" Hinami asks, "Did I remind you of your parents, too? That used to happen to me a lot. I'd see commercials with parents and a kid and it would make me cry."

Eika tries to calm down, but she can't stop shaking, can't stop more tears from streaming down her face, and she holds onto Hinami because she doesn't know what else to do. _It isn't fair_ , she thinks, _it isn't fair that you don't have parents because of humans._ There is so much she doesn't know about Ken and about ghouls and about this world she's stumbled into, and the more she learns the more helpless she feels.

"It's okay," Hinami says softly, "Just think about happy things that you still have."

Like the _waki_ who enters the stage far too late, long after the tragedy has already unfolded, Eika wishes she had known, wishes she had been there earlier, wishes she could have done something.

And yet, like the _waki_ , she knows the only thing she can do now is pick up the pieces that are left and forge on ahead.

* * *

"I don't get this part," Hinami says, pointing to the dialogue on the page. She sits up in bed, book open in her hands and notebook splayed open in her lap, kanji characters and their readings written in neat columns, and Eika sits in her desk chair beside her, glancing over her shoulder. "When the lady covers her eyebrows and asks, 'Does this become me?' what does she mean?"

"Oh, she's asking if the look suits her," Eika explains, "Like if you tried on a dress at the store and wanted to know if it looked good on you."

"But why does she hide her eyebrows like that?"

"A long time ago, married women would shave their eyebrows completely off, so she's saying…." Hinami's mouth opened wide in a yawn and Eika chuckled. "It's getting late. Why don't we stop here?"

"No," Hinami whines, "I can stay awake!"

"You should get some sleep, though," Eika says, "It's only Friday. I'll be here until Sunday, so we have plenty of time to finish the story."

Hinami pouts, thinking it over, before she nods. "Okay. We'll read more tomorrow," she says, her eyelids already starting to droop.

Eika nods, taking the books from Hinami's lap and setting them on her desk, turning off the lamp. "Goodnight, Hinami," she says, and receives an exhausted mumble in response. She tiptoes out of the room and shuts the door as softly as she can. The house is silent now, the TV and lights in the living room all turned off. Eika turns to head for the guest bedroom and nearly collides with someone standing in the hallway, biting down a startled shriek.

Tsukiyama puts his hands up in a placating gesture. "I didn't mean to frighten you," he says.

Eika presses a hand to her chest, feeling her heart beating rapidly. "Were you just," she fumbles for words, still trying to calm down, "Standing here in the dark waiting for me?"

"I didn't want to interrupt. Hinami treasures her reading time." He regards her with a solemn expression. "There's something I wanted to tell you."

Eika looks up at him patiently.

He gestures behind himself, to the end of the hall where a steeply ascending staircase leads to the second floor. "It would be better to show you first," he says, "Go upstairs, don't turn on any lights, and peek through the balcony curtains. Try not to make any noise."

"What…." Eika's brows furrow in confusion. "You're not going to come with?"

Tsukiyama smiles; it's pained and a bit desperate. "Please," he says, "It'll make things easier."

With great reluctance, Eika steps past him and makes her way up the stairs and into deeper darkness, all of the upstairs lights off and the curtains drawn. She has a terrible, sinking feeling as she reaches the second floor, hands on the wall to guide her to the balcony window, like something dangerous is waiting for her, like—

 _Hearing something heavy hit the floor just as her hand closes around the doorknob at the end of the school day, cicada cries loud in her ears, sweat running down her back, her mother choking on a scream_ —

But she can trust these people, she reminds herself, she doesn't have to be afraid, yet she's mindful of her heart beating rapidly in her chest and how loud her breathing is when she reaches forward with one shaking hand and peer through a slit in the balcony curtain.

Ken Kaneki stands outside on the balcony muttering to himself, one hand raised and popping the joints in his fingers one at a time, blood spattered on his clothes, dripping from hair, smeared over his lips.

"Five hundred thirty-one," she hears him rasp, "Five hundred thirty-one minus seven...five hundred twenty-four. Five hundred twenty-four minus seven...five hundred seventeen. Five hundred seventeen…."

She doesn't understand what she's looking at—not what he's doing there when he said he'd be busy all weekend, not what he's counting, not why he's covered in blood, _not whose blood it is_ —but she doesn't worry about any of it when he suddenly goes silent and she realizes why when she stops examining him and looks back up at his face only to find he's staring straight at her. She takes a reflexive step back, letting the curtain fall back into place, but she knows he saw her. She covers her mouth with both hands and fights to keep from whimpering when his silhouette draws nearer, and something makes a loud tap on the glass.

"Eika," she hears, and though the voice is Ken's, there's something _off_ about the way he says her name, something about the intonation or the cadence, as though he's talking in his sleep.

Then she hears footsteps outside slowly retreating, sees his silhouette shrink, and it's silent again.

Eika runs back down the stairs, uncaring of the rest of the household trying to sleep, and finds Tsukiyama still in the hallway. "Ken is up there," she says breathlessly, "And he's, I don't know if he's hurt or what, but—!"

"He's been up there for almost an hour," Tsukiyama says, "He does this most nights, either before or after he goes to see you. We all pretend we don't notice; this, or the binge eating."

"I don't understand," Eika says weakly.

"We don't need to eat as often as humans; a good meal once a month will suffice. Some of us choose to indulge a bit more often, of course, but Kaneki was never the sort to do that." Tsukiyama looks at the floor between them. "We really didn't notice at first, but he hasn't been as careful about it lately. He comes home a mess, and sometimes he doesn't even keep all of it down."

Eika shakes her head; she wants this to be a nightmare. "Why?"

"I don't know."

She bites her lip. "So he goes out and...a-and he eats...how many humans do you think he's eating a night?"

"Not humans."

"Sorry?"

"He isn't eating humans," Tsukiyama repeats.

She takes a shuddering breath. "Why are you telling me this?"

Tsukiyama looks at her with helplessness in his eyes, and she realizes that she is not the only one who regrets arriving far too late. "Because I worry about him," he says, "And because you are important to him, and I don't know what else to do."

Eika thinks she spoke prematurely in seeking out Noh theater as a remedy to Ken's tragedy. There are tragedies in the past that cannot be undone, lives erased and hardships born, but there is yet another unfolding now before her eyes. She does not have time to be the _waki_ , nor can she be, if this overwhelming dread is a sign of things to come, because that means there is still time.

There needn't be another tragedy at all.

That is what she must believe if she hopes to change anything.

* * *

In the morning, there is a bloody handprint on the balcony window. Jiro finds it and Sante says she'll get a hose and a washrag. Eika watches it melt away in the light of sunrise, and she writes.


	8. PS: I'll Do Anything For You

**When it rains, it pours. I had a heck of a week, but it's over now. Incidentally, you're also in for a ride.**

* * *

It feels like sleepwalking and tastes like a dream.

The air is warmer in spring, but it's so easy for the pleasant heat to turn into something stifling, something that boils his blood and makes him see red wherever he goes. It was white before, he thinks, surely all of this was white before; the pavement on the sidewalk, blank billboards with phone numbers plastered on the back, modern architecture in the business district with large windows and sky gardens on the balconies. It was white, he thinks, it was clean and untouched, sanitary like a hospital ward and just as fragile.

But then Rize came in—invited in, in his ignorance—and she left red footprints in her wake. She walked all over everything Ken loved, trampling his peaceful life, his belief in a world that could be kind at times, his memories. She left red wherever she went, carnations unraveling, splitting down the middle and turning into spider lilies, and Ken tried to hold on but the petals wilted and slipped through his fingers, leaving streaks of red over his hands like shards of glass.

And sometimes he forgets himself in the red because it's easier that way. He feels like his skin is itching, or rather, like something's beneath it trying to get out, and he's too restless to sit still so he leaves for a few hours and nobody asks any questions. He walks through empty parks at night and down narrow alleys, running his fingertips over the bricks. On a good day, he really will be alone, but sometimes he runs into someone else.

A ghoul, usually, lured out by something that almost smells human out all by itself at night. He used to try to talk them down or intimidate them, but he doesn't say anything or even look at them now.

Now, he relies on them to get him through the daylight hours.

He blooms like a spider lily, his kagune its scarlet petals, and everything he touches blooms, too, erupting into red. Like camellia or roses or tulips, these ghouls blossom all around him, shedding petals onto the concrete ground of their garden. But Ken is a flower that opens in the dark, and without sunlight to nourish him, he turns to whatever he can reach.

When he finally drags home, guided by instinct rather than conscious thought, he finds a budding flower there, too, the scent familiar and comforting. He reaches out but his hands hit glass, and though he knows he could break it, he does not. _It's there for a reason_ , something in the back of his foggy mind tells him, _it's there to protect what's inside,_ and suddenly he remembers that he knows this flower, that this flower has his scent upon it, that he knows its name.

 _Eika_ , it's called, and just like that, he wakes from the dream.

There are no flowers. There are no camellias or roses, and he is not a spider lily. Eika stands on the other side of the window, trembling, but even her fear smells sweet. There is blood on his hands and on his tongue, but he can tell she's only frightened, not injured. _Good,_ he thinks, the tension leaving his body, but he still feels guilty and dirtied and not ready to come home just yet, not ready to wake just yet.

So he goes back into town, counting down from one thousand by sevens, and he slips into a dream once again.

* * *

Ken avoids the house until Sunday night, long after Banjou has walked Eika home and though her scent lingers in the living room and the kitchen and in the guest room she slept in, it isn't so strong that he's overcome with regret. He told the others he was following a lead independently, and he doesn't know if they believed him or not, but they thankfully haven't brought it up. When he finishes showering and changes into something clean—black and white, sterile like a hospital, not red—he finds Hinami waving excitedly to him from the living room couch.

"Look what Eika gave me!" she says, holding up two books, one in each hand—a paperback copy of Fumiko Enchi's _Masks_ and a collection of Kyouka Izumi's short stories. "She said I can keep them for a whole week since we couldn't finish them while she was here. You have to help me read _Masks_ , though, it has a lot of big words."

"She left those here?" Ken asks. Hinami nods, handing him both books, and he tries to ignore the warmth that fills him when he breathes in and smells her on their pages, as though she's still there. He holds up the short story collection. "What was this one about?"

"There were a bunch of different stories in it," Hinami explains, "But my favorite was 'The Eyebrow-Hiding Ghost.' It was kind of confusing, but Eika made it make sense."

Ken thumbs through it and finds notes written in the margins and words circled, creases worn into the corners where they were surely folded down once. He feels a pang of nostalgia, remembers being a student, remembers life being so much simpler.

"You should go see her," Hinami says suddenly, "She looked sad when she left."

Ken hands the book back to her with a sad smile. "I was hoping I'd have the chance to see her this weekend," he lies, "It just didn't quite work out."

"Then you should go now," Hinami insists, "Since we're all going to be busy again soon, and then she won't be able to see you at all."

 _Busy_ is the word he'd told her to use in the wake of his failed attempts at locating Dr. Kanou through his nurse, and their upcoming plan to infiltrate the man's place of residence. He had no desire to involve Hinami in their upcoming operations, considering he wasn't sure what they'd find or how long they'd be there, and he'd finally convinced her that if Eika asked after him, she should simply say that he's "busy."

There was guilt, of course, that came with it, and as Hinami gazes up at him—and she knows exactly what she's doing, he knows now, pouting slightly and furrowing her brows to look a bit upset—he sighs and ruffles her hair.

If it wasn't obvious before, Ken thinks that it's especially clear now that he really doesn't know what he's doing, considering his love life is being directed by a thirteen year old.

* * *

A cold, early spring rain keeps Eika in for the evening, writing another letter addressed to Ken that she doesn't actually intend to send him. She's surrounded by towers of books and paper stacked precariously in several piles all over her desk, texts on ghoul behavior and biology, critical essay compilations and old graded assignments, a smattering of the things that make up her life now.

Her advisor has emailed her about setting up an appointment with a thinly-veiled request to join a student association or a club, something where she could meet people and make friends, which is extremely important "given her history."

 _"_ _I'm told that when we need others most, we withdraw from them,"_ she writes, _"And though I know it's true, I can't bring myself to change. It isn't right for me to be relying on you for emotional support, not when you have plenty of your own demons, but I find myself looking forward to your visits more than I do book signings. I want to tell you about how I've grown and changed, how I've found some kind of tentative happiness even though I've lost so much, but I always choke on the words and my regrets. I'm not sure that this is really happiness at all."_

There's a distant and low rumble, thunder somewhere far away, and Eika glances over at her balcony doors. She thinks of the weekend she spent in the 6th ward, of climbing those steps and finding Ken outside, out of his mind and covered in someone's blood—and she didn't care to know whose—and she wonders again about Tsukiyama and his motivations.

 _"_ _I don't think either of us like to hide things. But I do think, despite our love for literature, we struggle to find the right words so much of the time. There are not words that can adequately describe how we feel at times, the depth of our grief or our fear, and secrets are born from our inability to express ourselves."_

She stops when she reaches the very edge of the page, drawing a small arrow and tearing a sheet out of a nearby notebook. _"Even now, after I've laid my life out before strangers and written things that I could never say aloud, I still feel unsatisfied with the story I told. Somehow, I still think I failed to convey everything. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like for you…."_

A knock at her balcony door makes her jump, and she accidentally draws a line across the page with her pencil. She hurriedly opens the door and Ken steps inside, dripping rainwater on the carpet, and then rushes to the bathroom to get him a towel. "Sorry I'm a bit late tonight," he says when she returns, taking the towel gratefully to dry the hair sticking to his face.

"That's alright," Eika says, tucking the letter under a pile of assignments, "I wasn't sure if I should expect you or not, though, so I don't have any coffee ready."

"Don't trouble yourself," he says, stopping her with a hand on her forearm before she stands up again. He glances around the room and Eika flushes self-consciously, following his gaze that lingers on the dirty clothes pile that's begun to accumulate in the corner and the books strewn around the room, some lying open on their spines, some piled high enough that the stacks threaten to collapse with a light breeze. "Classes have really picked up, I guess," he tries to joke lightheartedly.

Eika smiles tightly. "Yeah."

"I'm not criticizing you," he adds, "I just noticed…." She sees him struggle to come up with something to say.

"It's getting a bit cluttered in here," she finishes for him, "I know. There's an exam this week, but once that's over, I'll have some free time to take care of it."

"Do you want any help?" he offers.

She shakes her head. "It won't be that hard."

"I know, but…." _I want to help you,_ lingers unspoken in the air between them, the offer lurking in Ken's worried eyes but not quite making it out of his mouth.

"Well," she says, glancing over to her bookshelf—half-empty with its contents spread over the room—"I'll let you know if I need to put anything away up high, and that can be your job."

Ken chuckles. "I guess that's better than nothing."

He doesn't comment on how strange he must find it, how out of character it is for her room to be such a mess, and Eika is thankful, because she wants to be able to take care of herself, wants to be able to handle without him, even on her worst days. Ken carefully folds the damp towel and sets it on the edge of the bed beside him, and Eika watches as he sits down, looking for any hints of distress or discomfort, but he's either wearing a mask of his own or it's a good day because she doesn't see any.

She wants to tell him about Tsukiyama and the incident over the weekend, wants to ask what's wrong and what she can do, wants to help him somehow, but she doesn't know what to say. The words, just the right words, are escaping her again, as they always do right when she needs them most.

"I've been really interested in Noh plays lately," she says instead, settling onto the bed beside him and looking down at her feet.

"Noh plays?" Ken repeats curiously, "I didn't really study them much. Those are kind of like ghost stories, right?"

She nods. "Yeah, kind of. I think of them as post-tragedies." This is something else she's wanted to talk about anyway, and she glances at Ken when she continues, "The _shite_ has already suffered by the time the _waki_ has arrived, and all that's left is to tell their story and help them find peace."

"You think," Ken says slowly, looking away from her, "That my life could be something like that?"

"I was going to suggest it, but I think I might have been wrong. Noh doesn't quite fit either," she admits, "Not for a lifetime, anyway. Noh is the kind of thing that lasts for just a moment."

 _Like when you saved me,_ she thinks, _Like when I, as the_ shite, _stood on that overpass like a living ghost and gazed down into the abyss, and you appeared like the_ waki _who just happened to be passing through, and you made things right._

"Maybe this isn't the answer you wanted," Eika says, "But I don't know if there's any point in defining your life with a literary genre. That's too constraining, isn't it? It just setting up expectations and binding you to a certain type of outcome. I don't want your future to be tied to anything like that."

She looks at him cautiously, hoping she hasn't said something upsetting, but Ken is closer suddenly, one of his hands on the bed behind her, and he's trying to find something to look at that isn't her face despite being close enough to kiss. "No, that's a good answer," he says softly, "I don't think I'll be able to help myself, though. It's restricting, but it's also comforting, in a way. I guess I'm expecting to be hurt, over and over again, and I think that passing it off as just the way it's supposed to be will make it easier to deal with."

Eika turns her body, fighting her nervousness even as their thighs touch and she feels his breathing nervous and uneven against her skin. She brings her hands up and gently cups his face, and he finally meets her eyes. "I'm never going to hurt you," she promises.

Ken seems to fall apart when she says it, gripping her shoulders with both hands, trembling, and he whispers, "I know," brokenly, before he crushes their lips together.

This isn't like the sweet, innocent kiss they shared at Anteiku what feels like a lifetime ago. This is desperate and frightened, Ken's arms wrapping around her—all six of them? She's confused for only a moment before she realizes it's his kagune—pulling her into his lap and holding her so tightly it hurts, and Eika tries to catch her breath between bruising kisses and nips at her throat that lack the force to break the skin but come awfully close.

"Ken," she tries to say, tries to pull him out of whatever dark place he's gone to in his thoughts, but he devours most of the word and doesn't seem to hear her. "Ken!" she tries again, pushing against his chest as hard as she can with nearly all of his appendages wrapped around her, and he freezes for a moment, pulling back to look at her but not daring to let go. One eyes is red and black, and saliva runs down his chin.

"Sorry," he says breathlessly, "Sorry. I just…I wanted…." He looks lost, biting his lip as his gaze wanders. Eika wonders how she tastes to him, but scolds herself for even thinking about it; she trusts him more than that. "I'm afraid of a lot of things," he says, "Mostly myself. The way I am now, the things I can do—the things I _have_ to do. I'm most afraid of losing myself." His kagune slowly release their grip and Eika sighs when she can breathe comfortably again, sure she has bruises somewhere in their shape. "But right next to that," he says, "I'm afraid of losing you. And I'll do whatever I have to if it'll keep you safe."

Eika wants to reassure him. She looks into his mismatched eyes and wants, so badly, to say that she believes in him and that she'll always be there for him and that nothing will ever tear them apart, but instead, she wraps her arms around him.

* * *

Earlier that day, she'd bumped into Nagachika at the library again, though it seemed by his quick approach from the next aisle over that he'd been waiting for her. "Hey, Ishihara," he called with a smile, "It's been a while. How've you been?"

"Not bad," she said neutrally, "How about you?"

"Pretty good. You know, I just got a job with the CCG."

"Oh, so that's why you're in this section again," Eika laughed, "Research for work, right?"

"Yeah, pretty much." There was a shift in his expression similar to the one she'd seen the first time they'd met, when she'd first aroused his suspicion. "I'm glad I ran into you. There's something I wanted to ask you about."

"Sure," she said, trying not to look as though she'd rather run away.

"I have a friend," Nagachika said, "Who went missing a while ago. The CCG thinks it's ghoul-related."

Eika had tried to look surprised. "Ghoul-related?"

"Yeah. He used to work at this café here in town, and he was a lit student, just like you. He would've been your upperclassman by a year. We used to meet here every day, because it was the only place I could catch him on campus. He always left right away because he wasn't in any clubs and didn't have a whole lot of friends. He didn't have any family, either, none that cared, anyway." Eika's breath caught in her throat at the sharp glance he gave her. "Actually," he said, "You remind me of him in a lot of ways."

"Ah, I don't know…."

"Your family situation is common knowledge," he cut her off, "There was that scandal after the memoir was published when your father committed suicide from the shame, and your mother publicly denounced you for driving him to it. You're a self-proclaimed recluse, at least in your book, and you always leave as soon as classes get out. You wrote that you were never very social and have trouble making friends. You also specifically mentioned visiting Anteiku around the time of your attempted suicide and meeting someone there who became important to you."

Eika froze. He knew, she realized, probably even before he ever approached her, that she had some connection to Ken.

"Now, you didn't say it was a waiter that you met," Nagachika goes on, "And you very carefully avoided describing this person in any way except for mentioning he was male. But I'm almost certain that you and I know someone in common. And, knowing that, I could probably have you brought in for questioning, since this is still an open case."

Eika's eyes widened, but she grew confused when he shook his head.

"But I won't," he said, "Because this is something I'd rather handle on my own." He offered a smile, probably to calm her, but Eika's heart was still racing. "If you don't feel comfortable talking to the police or the CCG, no matter the reason," he said, "You can talk to me."

She was struck by how genuine his concern was, how much he'd thought about her memoir and the circumstances surrounding it, and she thought that the right thing to do would be to tell him the truth; he deserved that.

But instead, she'd walked away playing the part of someone who knew more than she should, who was just as lost as Nagachika and just as desperate to find someone who was actually within her reach. And even though she felt guilty, even though she went home that evening with a few friendly, emoticon-filled texts from Nagachika who was convinced that, together, they would solve the mystery of Ken Kaneki's disappearance, she still never said a word.

 _"_ _I'm going to see him,"_ Ken had told her a while ago, _"This isn't easy for me."_

She'd gone from hoping she could gently encourage him to covering for him and sheltering him, but she was afraid to do anything else, afraid that a push in the wrong direction might make him shatter like glass and she would never find all the pieces. This was dangerous, she knew, this was unhealthy and unproductive and maybe even bordering on obsession, but it felt better than the alternative, safer somehow.

 _"_ _I'll do whatever I have to if it'll keep you safe,"_ he says in the present.

* * *

Eika rests her head against his chest and listens to his heart beat. "So will I," she whispers.


	9. PS: I Try Not to Lie

_Recently, I loaned a few books to Hinami. I hope you've had the chance to enjoy them together._ Masks _is an important book to me, but lately I've been thinking about the Izumi Kyouka anthology I left with her even more, particularly the ghost story. Maybe it's because I've been feeling haunted myself; it's the same sort of all-encompassing haunting as in the story, one that affects all of the senses. Perhaps possessed is a better word to use to describe the feeling._

 _I haven't worked up the courage to tell you this yet, and frankly, I hope I won't ever have to. I tell myself that it will all pass with time, but I'm really only guessing, trying to make myself feel better. When Tsukiyama asked me to help you, I was still struggling with my own insecurities and failures, but I've moved past that. Now, what occupies my mind is your situation and what could make it right._

 _But I should be honest, shouldn't I? After all, this is a letter that might not ever be sent, so I may write freely. The truth is more complicated than late-night ponderings or simple musings, and likely not what you've come to expect from me. I've written before that I don't think either of us means to keep secrets, and I still believe that. But it happens, time and time again, and we simply accept that there are some things we are not yet meant to know. I think you've grown accustomed to being the one who falls back on silence in the place of explanations, and you take comfort in knowing that you have unmasked me and seen all that lies beneath._

 _But there is more that you have yet to uncover, things that I have painstakingly hidden from you with layer upon layer of masks, and I suspect the same is true about you. We have so much to talk about, yet I fear we'll never get the chance._

 _I don't know why, but I feel as though something will tear us apart long before then._

* * *

Eika knows something is wrong when she calls the landline phone at Ken's and Hinami is the one to answer. "Hello?" the girl squeaks on the other end, sounding uneasy.

"Hinami? Is Ken there?"

"Um. No, he's not."

"Alright," Eika says, "How about Banjou?"

"He's not here, either." Hinami hesitates before adding, "It's just me here right now."

"You're home alone?"

"It's okay," Hinami says quickly, "Ken said it was okay, and everyone's coming home later."

Eika frowns. "Would it be alright if I came over?" she asks.

"Of course! Then you can have your books back."

She suspects Ken would be less than pleased to find out she went alone, but she also thinks what he doesn't know won't hurt him. She tells Hinami she'll be there soon and grabs her backpack, rushing to catch the first train she can. Tokyo flies by outside the window, people melding into crowds, celebrity's faces plastered on billboards, car parks and business towers. It's the same city it's always been, but nothing looks the same anymore. No one really knows how many ghouls live in Tokyo—she's seen estimates anywhere between a minuscule fraction of the population to over a third—but she knows they're there, right alongside humans, occupying the same space yet living in different worlds. Occasionally, when people go missing or when a raid on a foreclosed property turns up human remains stuffed in the back of a refrigerator, those two worlds collide.

 _Like Noh, or like one of Izumi's stories,_ she thinks, _like the ghost that floods rooms and leaves behind wet footprints, interacting with the world of the living for just a moment._

Hinami was particularly fond of 'The Eyebrow-Hiding Ghost' for reasons Eika can't fathom, as it was the story they spent the most time on despite Hinami having more trouble reading the others. There are no children in the story; Eika isn't sure if Hinami relates to one of the characters or if it's just enjoyable. She thinks the idea of ghosts is romantic, at least, the thought that one might leave behind a tangible legacy long after their death, one that moves and speaks and seeks out their loves ones.

But the ghosts that haunt Japanese mythology rarely stay for love, and Eika thinks there is something to be said for leaving nothing at all behind.

Hinami is on the second floor balcony when Eika arrives, a flower pot with a single sprout in her arms. She notices Eika all the way down the block when a breeze blows by, waving excitedly and setting the plant down before running back inside, shutting the glass doors behind her. She meets Eika at the front door downstairs, surprising her with a hug.

"I'm glad you came over," Hinami says, leading Eika into the living room. The house is quiet without the rest of the ghouls home, the siblings absent from their spot on the couch and the kitchen empty without Banjou rifling through cupboards. "I read the Izumi stories with Ken," Hinami says, holding the book out to Eika, "But we're still finishing _Masks_. Can we keep it a little longer?"

Eika smiles, nodding appreciatively as she takes the book and puts it in her bag. "Of course. What do you think so far?"

Hinami goes to sit on the couch, picking up her notebook from the table, and Eika drifts over to peer over her shoulder. "I like it," Hinami says, "But there are some things I don't really understand. I wrote down all the stuff I wanted to ask you."

 _Masks_ sits on the table with a bookmark sticking out somewhere in the first half, next to a pile of texts on Noh theater with library tags. The last thing on the table holds her attention the longest, though, sticking out with shiny black leather, zippers and buckles, a row of teeth in the front. "Hinami, what's this?" she asks curiously, reaching over her to pick it up. It's a mask, she thinks, or some kind of garment anyway, as she turns it over in her hands to examine. There's a large tear in the square patch above the teeth, unraveling and fraying the edges.

"That's Ken's," Hinami says quietly, "It got torn earlier, so he can't wear it now."

Eika stares at the mask for a moment, trying to imagine Ken wearing it, and struggles to come up with a mental image. "It was torn?" she asks.

Hinami bites her lip and looks away, putting her hands in her lap and twiddling her fingers. "Well, we were busy," she mumbles.

"Busy?" Eika repeats.

"Yeah. Um." The girl glances around the room as though looking for something, though her gaze eventually goes back to the mask in Eika's hands. Suddenly her eyes light up. "So we have to get it fixed."

"What?"

"Yeah!" Hinami jumps up from the couch, smiling. "Everyone else is already doing other things today, so we should go fix Ken's mask. I bet that'd make him happy."

Eika studies Hinami's face carefully, seeing just a hint of nervousness in her eyes. She relents with a sigh. "Well, alright," she says, "But I'm not really sure who fixes masks around here."

Hinami's smile widens. "I know someone."

* * *

Eika has vague memories of hearing mention of the 4th ward in the news frequently as a child. It had been a lawless ward overrun by ghouls who tore each other apart when the number of human residents dwindled. The CCG had little choice but to step back and let the problem take care of itself, resuming operations only at the end of a year-long campaign to swoop in and exterminate whatever was left when the dust settled. Since then, things have gotten better. Property values have gone back up and it's grown again into an artist magnet of metropolitan and alternative fashion, gothic Lolita shops and tattoo parlors springing up in once-dying strip malls.

She isn't surprised, then, when it's where Hinami claims they'll find someone who can fix Ken's mask. She stays close to the younger girl, who leaves home wearing an oversized coat, a medical mask, and a black wig, looking a bit like an eccentric preteen and fitting right in with the Shinjuku crowd. She leads Eika down twisting alleyways, past art galleries and nightclubs that have yet to open, before stopping front of an antique door with a little "open" sign hung on the knocker. A long sign on the left reads "HySy Artmask Studio" with the hours printed beneath, and a list of daily specials, sales and price listings is scrawled on a little blackboard outside. There's a dark red curtain hanging in the window, blocking any view of the inside of the shop, but two mannequin heads are propped up on the sill in front of it, one wearing a gas mask and the other some sort of balaclava with markings like a cat skull.

"This is the place?" she asks Hinami uneasily, and the girl nods, opening the door without hesitation.

Eika freezes in the doorway, a little intimidated by the display. Mannequin torsos are elevated on golden pedestals, all wearing different masks and staring in different directions. There are elaborate Venetian masks with feathers and gemstones, eerie and bone-colored masks with rows of sharp teeth carved into the bottom, Japanese festival masks that look like ogres and foxes, and no two designs are quite the same. There are a couple rows of masks hanging on the walls, seemingly leering down at them, and Eika feels self-conscious somehow as she follows Hinami into the store.

"Mr. Uta?" Hinami calls, tugging her medical mask down to speak clearly, "Mr. Uta, it's me."

"Just a minute," Eika hears a quiet reply, "I'll be right with you, Hinami."

Hinami tugs on Eika's sleeve, smiling. "It's okay. He's really nice."

Eika forces a smile back, realizing she must look a bit nervous. "I'm sure he is," she says.

"While we're waiting," the younger girl says, tugging her notebook out of her shoulder bag, "Can we talk about the story?"

"About….?" Eika blinks. "Oh, _Masks_ , right?"

"Yeah. There was a part when they all went to look at the Noh masks, but I wasn't sure what they looked like, so I couldn't imagine it very well." Hinami flips through her notebook for a certain page, holding it up for Eika to read.

"I see." She takes it from Hinami, smiling at the childish scrawl of words she isn't familiar with. "This first one is _zo-onna_. It's often used for characters with an exalted rank, like women in the royal court or goddesses. It's beautiful, but I've heard people say it looks cruel."

"Like that one?" Hinami asks, pointing to the wall. Eika follows her gaze and meets the cold eyes of a startlingly human-looking mask, one with small dots for eyebrows raised high above the eyes, perhaps in amusement, gently smiling lips painted in a rose red.

"Ah," Eika says, surprised and a little unnerved, "Yeah. Like that one." The painted eyes seem to follow her when she moves, its smile changing to a sneer if she tilts her head, and while she wants to look away, she's afraid to. "That's really impressive, actually. It almost looks like a real Noh mask, the way its expression changes in the light."

"Mr. Uta is really good at making masks."

"I can see that."

"What was the other one?"

Eika glances back down at the notebook. "That one was _ryo-onna_. It's used for ghosts."

"That's a bit vague, isn't it?" Eika hears from just over her shoulder and shrieks, dropping the notebook on the floor as she whirls around and presses herself back against the glass case. There's a man standing there, tall and a little pale, half of his head shaved and the rest of his black hair smoothed over one eye and tied into a ponytail. She sees tattoos, numerous piercings, black and white attire, but the rest of the details are secondary to his eyes; black and red like Ken's when he starts to lose control.

"I mean," he elaborates, " _Zo-onna_ is used for vengeful ghosts born of older women, who are still tormented by their unrequited love long after they've died."

"Mr. Uta!" Hinami scolds, "You scared her."

"Oops," he says evenly, and Eika can tell he's sizing her up, gaze moving from her face to the rest of her body, lingering briefly at her hands clutched in front of her chest. "I'm Uta."

"Eika," she squeaks, heart still beating rapidly, "Ishihara, Eika. Nice to meet you."

"Eika," Uta repeats slowly, dragging her name out as though weighing it on his tongue, "The writer."

"Uh…."

"Center of a media firestorm for a while there."

"I—!"

"And, of course, an associate of Kaneki's, but that's not surprising."

Eika pauses. "It's not?"

"No," Uta says, "Kaneki's gotten to know a lot of people in the last few months. A few friends, a few more enemies. Mostly people who want nothing to do with him when they realize what they're getting themselves into."

"What…?"

"Mr. Uta," Hinami pleads, "I'm not supposed to…."

Eika is still confused, but Uta seems to understand, nodding. "My bad," he drawls, "I shouldn't talk about things that aren't my business, which is what I assume you came here for?"

"Ken's mask got ripped," Hinami says, producing it from her bag and handing it to the man.

"I see," he says, examining the tear, "That's quite a gash. I'd love to know what he did to get it." He glances at Hinami. "I assume the Gourmet is paying for this?"

She nods. "Will it be ready soon?"

He shrugs. "Yeah, I don't have a lot going on today, so I can start on it now. Might be worth it to just replace the whole eye patch. You can come back for it later."

"Thanks, Mr. Uta!" Hinami says, and starts trotting towards the door.

Eika doesn't quite take the first step to follow her when she hears, "Actually, I was hoping I could talk to you for a minute," and turns back slowly to see Uta's eyes boring holes into her. "If you don't mind," he adds after a long silence, and Eika glances at Hinami, who's stopped in the doorway uncertainly.

"That's fine," she says, exhaling when Hinami comes back inside. She tells herself she's protecting Hinami, that she doesn't want her going home alone, but she's also relieved she won't be in the store by herself with the mask maker.

"I've got a couple spare chairs around here somewhere," Uta says, gesturing towards the back of the shop where his desk is. Sewing equipment and sketch paper are scattered across it and a cork board full of photographs and human anatomy posters hangs on the back wall. He pulls up a couple of stools—one on the side that Hinami plops down into and one pointedly beside his own, but Eika makes herself sit without looking like she's hesitating too long. Uta takes his seat, and though his eyes are on the mask as he reaches for a seam ripper, Eika still feels that his attention is on her.

"You don't have to stay the whole time," he says, "I just wanted to talk a bit. We haven't been properly introduced, after all."

"Right."

"So. Let's talk. About you and Kaneki."

Hinami has pulled out a cell phone and is playing a game of some kind, oblivious to the conversation. Eika glances at the wall, studying a vintage diagram of the abdominal cavity. "What about us?"

"You're a lot alike," he says as he works, "Although, maybe it's more accurate to say you _were_ a lot alike. Before Yamori."

Eika nods.

"I was there that night," he goes on, "The manager of the place he used to work at organized a rescue party. We didn't know it at the time, but we were probably unnecessary. Ken would've escaped with or without our help, because he'd gotten that strong." The eye covering comes undone from the rest of the mask, and Uta holds it up, sticking a finger through the hole slashed across it. "I only met him a couple times before that," he says, "And honestly, I didn't think someone like him could get through what he did alive. And maybe he didn't. You're a literature student, right? I guess you know all about metaphorical death."

"He's definitely been through a lot," Eika agrees, "I don't know if I'd go as far to say that he died, though. He's had to change to survive, but he's still the same person I remember."

 _I still love him,_ she thinks, and her face flushes a bit.

"That's true," Uta says, "He is still Kaneki, underneath it all. I don't think he'll be able to change that, even if he tries." He reaches into a drawer beneath his desk, digging through fabric scraps. "It makes you think, though, doesn't it?"

"What does?"

"Kaneki's changes. It seems even the most unassuming people can undergo the kinds of transformations he has. It's inspiring, I guess. But more importantly," he pauses meaningfully, turning to meet Eika's eyes, "It makes me wonder if he had it in him all along and this is just what brought it out."

Eika looks away. "Ah. I'm not sure."

"Aren't you curious?" he pushes, "Don't you ever think about what you would do if you were in his position? Do you think you would have made it?"

"I don't think so."

"I didn't think Kaneki would have," he says wistfully, "Yet here we are. It's interesting."

"Are you," she hesitates, unsure if she wants to even ask, "What exactly are you trying to say?"

"Hinami lent me a book of hers not too long ago," he says absently, though he glances at Hinami to see if she's paying attention, finding her engrossed in her game, "It was something by Edogawa Ranpo, can't recall the title. Lots of short stories."

"Oh. Did you like it?"

He nods. "It was good. I remember, in particular, the one about the woman who takes care of her husband after he comes home from war disfigured. You know the one I'm talking about?"

" _The Caterpillar._ "

"Yeah, that's the one. Both of those characters were in a pretty hopeless situation, don't you think? Wasn't much they could do to fix it; he was a deaf-mute quadriplegic amputee, and she had no one to help her take care of him."

Eika glances at Uta's profile as he begins to work on a new eye cover, hand stitching with a large needle. He's looked half-asleep since they came in, slouching and looking at her with a half-lidded gaze, but now she thinks he seems a bit more animated, something like an excited smile touching his lips.

"And yet," he says, "They both underwent transformations in their own way."

"I thought the point was that they couldn't change," Eika says warily, "The husband was like a caterpillar that would never become a butterfly, and the wife had no one else and nowhere to go."

"But they did change," Uta insists, "Even if it was only in each other's minds, and in their memories of one another, they changed. Not into butterflies, or into better people." He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, smiling. "But into monsters."

* * *

"Banjou and the others should be back by now, don't you think?" Eika asks as she walks with Hinami back to the train station.

The younger girl nods, glancing up at the sky. "It's almost nighttime. If they're not home yet, they should be soon."

"Good. You can tell Ken about the masks you learned about."

Hinami hesitates a moment before answering. "Ken probably won't be back tonight."

"Oh." Eika doesn't know if it's worth asking why; she knows they don't want to tell her much. "Well, later on, you can come back with them to get Ken's mask. It'll be a nice surprise when he gets home."

"Yeah!" Hinami looks up at her, and Eika can tell she's smiling from her eyes even with her mouth covered by the medical mask. "Are you going to stay the night again? Then you can come with when we go back to Uta's. You guys talked for a long time."

Eika smiles tightly. "Not this time," she says, "But I'll come to visit again soon."

She goes back to the 6th ward to drop Hinami off, waiting until she turns the lights on upstairs to let Eika know she's in safely, and heads back to the train station for the final trek home. She tries to think about what classwork she needs to get done for next week or what Ken might be up to, but her thoughts keep straying back to her conversation with Uta, the way he looked at her as they sat at his desk and she wanted nothing more than to run away.

 _"_ _No one becomes a monster because they want to," he'd said, "But he became one to cope with what happened, and she became one to cope with him, and that's how they began to see one another and themselves."_

 _Eika had swallowed her nervousness and asked timidly, "Are we still talking about the story?"_

 _Uta regarded her with amusement in his eyes. "I dunno. You tell me."_

She wraps her arms around her bag in her lap, taking a deep breath. Does Uta know something she doesn't? She finds herself thinking about all of the things she doesn't know, all of the things Banjou and Tsukiyama and Ken himself—and even Hinami—are keeping from her, the way they go quiet when she asks certain questions and hush one another when they misspeak, and she worries.

Her worry morphs into a gnawing anxiety as the train slides into her home station, and as she steps onto the train platform, she feels eyes following her from somewhere she can't see. She tries to walk normally at first, keeping pace with the crowd that departs with her up the stairs and onto the street, picking up the pace when it begins to thin out and everyone goes their separate ways. She waits nervously at the crosswalk, glancing over her shoulder and tapping her foot impatiently, unsure if this is simply paranoia, but she speedwalks across the street when the light changes. By the time she's a block away, she's running, footsteps heavy on the staircase up to her apartment, slamming the door shut behind her and resting her back against it as she waits to stop hyperventilating. She starts to feel a bit embarrassed, laughing quietly to herself as she locks the door and kicks off her shoes, going to sit at her desk and relax.

She doesn't quite have the light on when she hears something heavy land on her balcony, and she's just turning to look when something bangs against the glass, making her jump from her seat. She can make out a silhouette in the dark, someone crouching outside with a hand and a twitching, pulsing thing that must be a kagune pressed against the glass, though not one that she recognizes. Eika takes a step back, voice seemingly frozen in her throat as she feels behind her along the wall, trying to find the door without taking her eyes off of the intruder.

The balcony door is wrenched open, lock snapping out of place uselessly, and the kagune shoots into the room, slamming into the wall beside her head. She takes a shuddering breath as more begin to spiral into existence from behind the figure as it steps inside, several hanging limply at their side, one reaching back to pull the balcony door shut. Eika squeezes her eyes shut and waits, too terrified to move, when she's caged in by the other kagune and the figure comes to a stop in front of her. She hears the large kagune beside her head writhing, small tendrils coming off of its sides scraping the wall, and takes a shuddering breath.

"…Eika…."

She opens her eyes in shock. In the dark, she can make out some kind of inhuman face, something like a pointed beak and a single glowing eye in the center, but it looks too hard and stiff to be flesh. _A mask,_ she realizes.

"Eika," her name is muttered again, slowly with odd intonation. As her fear fades into confusion, she notices the familiar black clothing and white hair, the smaller kagune that she's seen before and held in her hands, and she almost feels foolish for not noticing before.

"Ken?" she whispers.


	10. PS: But I Keep Doing It Anyway

He does not want to think.

It hurts to think, and he, like every living creature, does not want to hurt. There is a void that grows inside of him and it grows bigger the more he suffers, it devours him from the inside and leaves raw, fraying edges, and he worries that if it grows too large he will tear at the seams and everything he stuffs inside will come tumbling out; all of the memories, all of the chopped off fingers and toes, all of the ghouls he has eaten, all of the red.

And he has to eat more, has to keep tossing things into the void—frantic screams, frightened eyes and trembling limbs, wretched, ugly creatures that beg and plead for life, but they have no _right_ to ask for anything, they are at _his_ mercy in _his_ world and there is nowhere left to run—or else the void will feed off of him instead. And he does not want it to hurt, so he flees from pain with mouthfuls of flesh and leaves a trail of blood behind him.

 _Humans,_ he thinks, _humans are weak._ He passes over them soundlessly in the night, casting a fast-moving shadow that's gone when they turn to look, and it would be so easy, _so easy_ to just reach down and pluck them from the earth like fresh fruit, to squeeze until the skin splits and the juice runs down his hands, sweet on his tongue and warm down his throat, but he does not because there are rules that he follows, rules he has set for himself so he can continue to exist.

 _Protect what is weak._

That was his goal, that was what he set out to accomplish. The weak boy who was dragged into Aogiri Tree's base emerged a monster with a bottomless appetite, a growing nothingness that gnawed on the edge of his mind and threatened to swallow him whole. He does not have to think, but he has to _remember,_ remember the promise he made and the people he treasures, and that will guide him when nothing else makes sense.

He comes upon a worm, pitiful, soft-bodied, not fast enough to escape as he descends from the rooftops and holds it down with all of his limbs, and it screams and writhes and tries to fight him but he is stronger—he is a centipede—and he pulls it apart piece by piece, eating until there is nothing left to eat.

With his hunger sated and the pain fading, the void shrinking, he feels he can rest but he does not know the way home. _Home_ , he wonders, _where is home? Do I have a home?_ He is not thinking but he is remembering—warm places, safe places, quiet places, places with nice scents. His body moves automatically and he does not know where he is going, only that it seems like home.

It takes time, but eventually he reaches a place he believes is his, where he can smell his own scent; a nest, perhaps, somewhere he must return to each night, because he feels he knows it. But he sees movement inside, sees someone there in _his_ nest, and he feels territorial anger rising to the surface. How _dare_ they, how dare _anyone_ take what little belongs to him? There is a thin, glass door that he shoves aside, kagune shooting through the opening to trap the intruder—the insect, the prey, _filthy creatures fit for nothing more than to be fed upon_ —and he stalks forward to feed.

But the smell in the room is not what he expected. It is not only his scent, but that of another; it belongs to the shaking creature he has cornered against the wall. He wonders how long she has been here as he approaches curiously, if he allowed her to stay when he was thinking rather than remembering.

He knows, somehow, as he comes close enough to breathe in her scent, that she is meant to be here.

"Eika." A name comes to mind, associated with the smell. He cannot see clearly, cannot take in the details of her face, only the vague outline of her form from her body heat, but he remembers. "Eika," he repeats, uncertainty giving way to relief. Yes, she is meant to be here. She is meant to be close to him, to have his scent upon her, he's certain of it now.

He holds her. She's not warm enough, and he worries, wrapping his kagune around her next. He thinks he feels her shivering, but she is still soon enough, relaxing into the heat his kagune provide. "Eika." He's tired, so tired that he just wants to sleep for days, so he sinks to the floor and brings her with him, rolling onto his side and tucking her head beneath his chin. She makes sounds that he doesn't understand, doesn't want to think about right now, so he lets his eyelids fall shut and enjoys the familiarity and the comfort before he finally lets himself fall asleep.

* * *

Ken wakes up starving.

He's roused to waking by the smell of coffee and slowly sits up, groaning and rolling his stiff shoulders. "Good morning," he hears, and looks up to see Eika Ishihara standing in her kitchen, one ceramic mug in each hand, smiling tiredly. "How're you feeling?"

Ken stares up at her at a loss for words. He doesn't remember coming to Eika's at all, much less falling asleep on her floor. "Fine," he says slowly, "I think." She sits on the edge of her bed, and Ken goes to join her, gratefully accepting the coffee offered to him. He takes a sip and blinks in surprise; it's much better than her last attempt. "So," he begins awkwardly, "What did I do last night?"

She glances at him while she takes a long sip, then away, as though unsure of what to tell him. "Well," she says finally, "You broke in. I think the latch on my balcony door is broken."

Ken glances back at it and finds the door slightly askew. "I broke in?" he repeats.

Eika nods wordlessly. Her hair is sticking up at odd angles, kept out of her face by a headband, and she's struggling to keep her eyes open. "You came in," she says, "Pinned me against the wall, hugged me really hard, and then collapsed on the kitchen floor."

A bird chirps just outside of Eika's balcony window, breaking up the following silence. The curtains are drawn, but he sees bright light trickling in at the bottom; it must be midday.

"And your kagune kept moving," she goes on, massaging her temple with her free hand, "I think you were asleep, but they would slide across the floor or start twitching now and then. It was a little unsettling, considering most of them were on top of me or wrapped around me."

"I…." He shakes his head. "Eika, I'm so sorry. I don't…I…."

"It's okay." She smiles. "You didn't hurt me. It was a little scary, but I'm alright. I trusted you, and you came through for me."

"But that's," Ken inhales shakily, setting the coffee down on the floor because he doesn't trust himself to hold it without spilling it or destroying it, "That's not okay, Eika, what if I _did_ hurt you? How can you trust me when I can't even remember doing any of that? It just takes one time for me to fuck everything up, and there's no fixing that, no way to undo—!"

"Ken," Eika says, and he reluctantly meets her eyes, "I am not afraid of you."

"Why not?" he asks hoarsely.

"Because I trust you. I trust you not to hurt me."

Ken shakes his head, unsatisfied by the answer. He didn't account for this, didn't think his fits would get worse and the gaps in his memory would grow. Ever since raiding Dr. Kanou's lab—a trip he'd pointedly never told Eika about—things had been getting worse. He'd come to his senses in the night, the blood of innumerable other ghouls on his hands and their taste on his tongue, but never had he gone near Eika in such a state.

At least, not that he can remember. The thought that he might not even know bothers him even more.

"You were counting," she mentions, "Subtracting by sevens."

He shakes his head. "Of course I was."

"It's not the first time I've heard you do it. Does it have something to do with Yamori?"

He nods. "I didn't mention it before. It just seemed like an unnecessary detail."

"Do you remember," she begins softly, "In _The Housekeeper and the Professor_ , how the professor used math to remember things?"

Ken shakes his head.

"He could only hold onto short-term memories for so long but math was something intuitive to him that he never forgot. So he processed the whole world that way, and it helped him deal with things."

He glances at her, feeling himself relax at the sight of her small smile. That isn't why he counts, and he knows it, but he wonders if this could be a part of redefining his life with literary genres. If he can't rewrite the whole narrative, maybe he can just take pieces and reinterpret them. Maybe he can believe that he counts now not because it's trauma that's been carved into him, but because it's a coping mechanism, a way to keep track of himself and what he knows without thinking too deeply— _get stronger, protect them, destroy anything in the way_ , the foundations upon which his new self was built.

"You don't usually eat humans, do you?" It's phrased like a question, but Eika's tone suggests she already knows the answer. Ken hesitates and then shakes his head. "You're eating other ghouls."

"Banjou and his friends go out scavenging every couple weeks," he says, "They bring back bits and pieces that we save. If I'm at home, that's what I eat."

"And that's human?"

He nods. "The same way we did it at Anteiku."

"But you don't usually eat at home."

"Hardly ever now." He has to look away, too ashamed to hold her gaze. "I'm not sure they even know. It just happens sometimes when I fight. I'm not necessarily hungry, I just think that…that I'll feel better if I eat." He glances up to make sure Eika is still there and she doesn't look disgusted, and as the seconds tick by in silence and nothing changes, relief washes over him. "I haven't told anyone about it yet," he says, "You're the first to know. Actually, I feel a lot better now."

"I'm glad," Eika says, gently setting a hand on his shoulder without the half-second pause this time, and Ken prides himself on not even flinching. "You can tell me anything, you know that, right? If you feel ready to talk about it, I'll listen."

"I know. I'm glad you're here." He pauses. "How did you know I read _The Housekeeper and the Professor_?"

Eika looks embarrassed. "Sorry," she says, "I found out from Nagachika that we went to the same high school, so I just assumed you read the same things I did."

"You two are talking?"

She shrugs, looking uncomfortable. "Now and then."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to put you between us. I still…" Ken shakes his head. "I'm afraid to face him. I don't know why."

"I don't know him as well as you do," Eika admits, "But from the way he talks, I don't think he'd turn his back on you, no matter what." She finishes her coffee and sets her cup beside his on the carpet. "On a more light-hearted note, your favorite author is doing a live reading next weekend."

"Sen Takatsuki?"

She nods. "I thought it would be nice if you, Hinami and I could go together."

"That would be nice," he agrees, but his smile falls when he realizes something. "It's not the weekend yet, is it? Don't you have class right now?"

She shakes her head. "As soon as I could detangle myself from you, I emailed my professors that I was sick, and that I plan to be back in a couple days." She cuts him off before he can apologize, "It's fine. I can afford to miss a few days without any problem. Besides, I wanted to make sure you were alright."

Eika's cell phone lets out a chime on her desk, and they both glance at it. "That's probably Tsukiyama," she says, going to get it, "He texted last night if I'd seen you, and I let him know you were here."

Ken stands from the bed. "I should probably get going."

"Should I walk you back?"

"You don't need to."

"It would make me feel better," Eika says.

Ken notices she's the first one to look away this time. "Is Tsukiyama having you keep an eye on me?" He doesn't mean for it to come out quite so sharply, but he sees Eika wince.

"He's just worried."

He almost says that it's unwarranted, but he catches the words before they leave his mouth, remembering waking up not so long ago, disoriented with no memory of the previous night.

"Humor me?" she asks, looking apologetic, "If not for Tsukiyama's sake, then for mine."

"I never told you about what was happening because I didn't want you to worry."

She smiles thinly. "It's a little hard not to worry now."

He sighs. "Fair enough."

* * *

By nightfall, they're back in the 6th ward. Ken sits on the couch trying to reassure Banjou that he's fine while Hinami and Sante start brewing coffee in the kitchen and Tsukiyama scolds him for not telling them he was going out on his own. Eika watches from the kitchen and tries to stay out of the way, smiling at Ken's irritated but grateful expression; she imagines it's nice to come home to people who care.

"Oh, Eika!" Hinami says when she walks by to get to the cupboard, standing on her tiptoes to reach the coffee beans stored on the shelf, "I finished _Masks_. I really liked it!"

"That was fast," Eika says, "What are you going to read now?"

Hinami shrugs. "I dunno. I'm out of books. I thought about going to the library tomorrow to look for something else."

"If you want something in particular, I could try to find it at the university library."

"Really?" Hinami grins. "Could you find a book with folk tales?"

Eika blinks. "Folk tales?"

"Yeah. Banjou and I went back to Mr. Uta's to get Ken's mask, and Mr. Uta told me that some Noh plays are based on old folk tales, so I want to read some of those now."

"Oh. Well, I'm sure I could find something."

"Eika," Ken calls from the living room, "It's getting late. Did you want to go home tonight, or would you mind staying over?"

Eika almost asks Banjou if he'd mind walking her back, but she catches sight of Hinami's hopeful eyes out of the corner of her eye. "I guess," she says slowly, "I told my professor I'd be back the day after tomorrow."

"Yay!" Hinami cries, throwing her arms around her.

Eika catches Ken smiling before he turns back to ask Jiro if she has any clothing Eika could borrow to sleep in. The house grows quiet after worry over Ken subsides, and Eika later joins him at the couch where they read in silence side by side. Time passes quickly and soon she's struggling to keep her eyes open, and she's pleasantly surprised when she feels Ken pull her closer, encouraging her to lean her head on his shoulder.

There's so much that isn't okay right now—so much they need to talk about and confront, all of the secrets they're both keeping—but for now, they can pretend that everything is fine.


	11. PS: I'm Like the Wind in the Pines

**It's still the weekend somewhere.**

* * *

 _I reread 'Zoo' last night because I felt I had to. The metaphors are endless; being forced to watch something you love slowly decomposing and falling apart, one snapshot at a time. It makes my heart hurt to see you suffer, to see that someone long gone has left scars on you that still ache, but maybe you're not the only one that applies to. I'm doing my best for both of us._

 _But when you look at it carefully, 'Zoo' is more about denial, isn't it? It's about refusing to come to grips with what's happened and talking yourself into seeing something pleasant superimposed over an unacceptable reality. That could apply to us, too, couldn't it? Lying through omission to ourselves and to one another, pretending that nothing has changed and that we're both the same people we were when we first met at Anteiku._

 _Nagachika sends me texts now and then, but we haven't actually met in some time. This is another thing I can't tell you because I think you might be disappointed, or at the very least, wary of me. Maybe you have reason to be. Maybe someday, I'll show you these letters and we'll finally have a talk long overdue about all of things we don't say to one another._

 _It's more likely that we won't._

* * *

"Are you already finished with your ghoul book?" the library assistant asks.

Eika looks up in surprise from the hardcover folklore collections on the counter between them. "What?"

"I'm kidding," the other girl laughs, "A few weeks ago, you came in with a bunch of books in ghouls, and I said you should write a murder mystery."

"Oh, right." Eika smiles, shaking her head. "Sorry, I don't think I'm really the mystery type."

"Must not be tired of ghouls yet, though. You've still got a bunch of books out."

"I'll start bringing them back on Monday." Eika puts the books into her bag, smiling as she imagines Hinami's excitement when she gives them to the younger girl. She'd tried to find a wide variety of stories, since the most well-known ones of shape-shifting mischievous foxes and badgers were far more whimsical than what she suspected Hinami would be interested in. If she'd gotten an interest in folklore through Noh, then she was certainly still looking for vengeful ghosts and tragedies.

It takes Eika a moment to find Ken and Hinami at their agreed meeting spot at the train station, but she eventually spots Hinami in her long-haired wig disguise, dark glasses and a medical mask on her face, and finds Ken standing behind her, dressed differently than usual with a knit cap over his white hair. "Did you wait long?" she asks.

Ken shakes his head. "We left a little late, so we just got here."

"Good. I stopped on my way for a little something." She opens her bag, handing Hinami the books, and even though she can't see her eyes, she can tell from her excited squeak that she's smiling. "We had a lot of folklore books, but I picked just the ones that I thought you'd like."

"Thank you!" Hinami says excitedly, tucking them into her shoulder bag, "I'll read them all tonight!"

"I was thinking," Ken says as they start to walk, "That Miss Takatsuki will probably recognize you from TV. I don't really want to draw attention to Hinami and I, so when we get there, we should probably go in separately and not talk too much."

Eika purses her lips. "I didn't even think about that," she murmurs, "Sorry, I should have realized."

"It's alright," he says, smiling reassuringly, "We'll still sit together."

He sounds relaxed, but Eika notices his stiff posture, hands in his pockets, the way he keeps his head down as his eyes scan the crowd, watching carefully for the CCG. They walk a step or two ahead of her, just far enough that it seems they're strangers. Eika is disappointed, but she doesn't know what she was expecting; a nice, normal outing with Ken and Hinami to raise their spirits? She's frustrated with herself for being so naïve.

But when they stop at the cross walk and Eika ends up beside Hinami, Ken glances discreetly from beneath his hood and the smile he gives Eika makes her realize he's grateful for the invitation all the same.

"Are you familiar with the Noh play _Matsukaze_?" Ken asks suddenly.

Eika nods. "I do. It's one of the more popular ones, I think."

"Hinami told me about it just the other day."

Hinami nods. "That's because Mr. Uta gave me this," she says, producing a folded paper from her bag and handing it to Eika. Eika curiously opens the paper and finds it's a flier for a five-play Noh performance coming to Tokyo in a couple weeks. "He said he knows one of the performers, so he can help us get tickets if we want to go."

The mention on the mask-maker makes Eika a little nervous, but she hears the excitement in Hinami's voice and can't help but smile.

"Aren't Noh plays kind of hard to understand?" Ken asks, "Since they use so much archaic language. They're really long, too."

"I don't care," Hinami insists, "It would make you both happy."

Eika stops walking when she realizes Hinami is wiping at her face, putting her hands on the girl's shoulders. "Hinami," she says, "Please don't cry. I'd love to go, but I'm not going to make you sit through it if you don't think you'd like it."

"But it would make me happy," she sniffles, "Being with you and Ken is like being with my mom and dad. I just want all of us to be happy and never be sad again."

Eika bites her lip, unsure of what to say. Hinami is trembling, clinging to Eika's shirt, and Eika tries to give her a hug and tell her that everything will be okay while feeling horribly inadequate. _We can't be your parents,_ she thinks sadly, _We can hardly take care of ourselves, let alone one another._

Ken crouches beside Hinami, one hand on her head gently stroking her hair. "It's alright," he says gently, "We are going to be happy from now on. Nothing is going to hurt us anymore. I won't let it." He looks to Eika with a confident smile, and she tries her hardest to return it.

She supposes she and Ken make suitable foster parents, if only because there's no one else to do it.

* * *

Sen Takatsuki sits in the bookstore café behind a printed name card propped up on the table, stacks of _The Black Goat's Egg_ and _The Hanged Man's MacGuffin_ piled high on either side of her. She makes small talk with the store employees while people filter into the seats in front of her, anxiously clutching copies for her to sign afterwards. Eika tries to quietly slip into a seat towards the back but is noticed immediately, an excited, "Miss Ishihara!" coming from the front of the room that draws every eye to her. Eika smiles nervously and hurries up to Sen, who's waving excitedly from her table as though there's any way Eika could miss her.

"It's good to see you again, Miss Takatsuki," Eika says politely.

Sen smiles peaceably. "You don't have to sound so uptight! We're kind of like classmates, or at least kindred spirits, aren't we?"

"You'd still be my senior, regardless," Eika insists, "I have a lot to learn from you."

"So modest," Sen laughs, "Sit in the front, won't you? I'm sure I'll be held up a bit at the end, but we should do coffee, my treat." She gestures for one of the store employees to save a chair, and Eika quickly shakes her head, embarrassed.

"You don't have to do that," she says, gaze sliding back towards the back row where she spots Ken and Hinami, who successfully slipped in unnoticed when Sen's outburst directed attention to the other end of the room.

"Come now, Miss Ishihara," Sen says, grinning slyly as she steeples her fingers and rests her head over them, "Let your senior treat you to coffee."

Aware of all of the eyes on her, Eika swallows. "Only if it's not too much trouble for you."

She receives a smile in response.

 _The Black Goat's Egg_ isn't Sen Takatsuki's latest work, but her publishers are releasing a special edition that comes with "Winter Shower at Night," the work's prototype, and previously unfinished shorts that tie in with the main novel. "I might've been too ambitious when I wrote it," Sen says with a chuckle, "I wanted to accomplish so much more than what I ended up putting to paper. I'm not unhappy with the final result, but I hope my fans would consider reading the new short stories, too, to get a better sense of what I wanted to convey."

She opens her own copy to a dog-eared page towards the beginning. "I was going to include a love interest for the murderer's child, but it never quite worked out. And I really regret that; I thought a lot about exploring what lust and romantic love might've been like for the protagonist."

Eika flinches when Sen looks directly at her.

"But lately," she goes on, holding Eika's gaze with a gradually widening smile, "I've been getting some inspiration again, and I knew I had to write about it. So I thought I'd read a little bit of "Mary, Who Knew Too Much," a story that centers on this fragile love."

Sen looks different when she reads. She's carefree and lackadaisical ordinarily, tapping her nails against her thigh or rocking back and forth as though she has trouble sitting still, smiling as though everything she hears amuses her. But when she reads—and Eika wonders if it's because of the sorts of things she tends to write about—she's nothing like that. When Sen settles into her chair and looks down at the book in front of her, she relaxes and sits perfectly still, reading in a low and steady tone that's both comforting and ominous.

"Closer. He wanted to be closer, close enough to smell her fear," Sen reads, "Because she was afraid, no matter what gently-worded reassurances she gave. 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I believe in you,' she may have said, but her body trembled and tears ran down her cheeks; round like pearls, sweet like blood. She knew too much, but she said too little."

Eika doesn't mean to let her mind wander, but it's hard not to. The store is silent except for Sen's steady voice, and it lulls her into the same sort of tranquility she slips into late at night, when her body is tired but her mind is racing, playing back over her mistakes and her regrets.

 _"_ _This is really how you feel?" her mother sobbed, clutching a copy of Eika's memoir in her hands, pages damp with her tears. "Are you just trying to get attention? Why didn't you just talk to me instead? Why would you publish this?"_

 _Eika stands in the doorway, schoolbag in hand, watching her mother cry over the kitchen table. She doesn't say anything._

 _"_ _Why did you do this?" her mother asks, "Why would you ruin our lives like this? I know we weren't perfect, but we did our best for you. He loved you as much as I did."_

 _Eika rubs her wrists._

 _"_ _Don't you remember the good times, too? When you were little, he would take you to the zoo and carry you on his shoulders, and—!"_

 _"_ _I don't remember," Eika says, "I don't remember any of that."_

 _Her mother looks at her through bleary, red-rimmed eyes, and then she buried her face in her hands._

Enthusiastic applause startle her, and she blinks, looking around and realizing that Sen has finished reading. She looks back, scanning the crowd for Ken and Hinami, but doesn't see them. She wonders if they already left and feels guilty she couldn't at least say goodbye.

Sen is approached for autographs and questions afterwards, and Eika wanders the store while she waits, trying to distract herself. She grabs a magazine to flip through, only half of her attention on the opinion columns and pictures, the other half unable to focus on anything but her worries.

"Sorry to make you wait," she hears, and eagerly puts the magazine away when she sees Sen approaching from the café.

"No, that's alright," she says.

"You looked a bit distracted at the end."

Eika looks away, embarrassed. "I'm sorry. Your reading was wonderful, I just got a bit lost in thought."

Sen doesn't seem offended, laughing off with a casual wave. "Oh, I don't mind if you get lost in thought. I doubt you can help it. No offense, Miss Ishihara, but you always look a bit lost."

"How do you mean?" Eika hurries to catch up when Sen starts walking, heading for the door.

Sen laughs. "Well, something like that. It's that look that made me want to invite you out, actually. I think we'd be good friends."

Eika smiles shyly. "You think so?"

The other writer stops walking briefly, looking back at her. "Hm. That's not the look I was thinking of," Sen says thoughtfully, "Never mind, you probably can't do it on command."

Sen takes her a few blocks away to a quiet café which just a few other patrons in their own corners. When they both have their drinks, she pulls out a special edition copy of _The Black Goat's Egg_ and pushes it across the table, closer to Eika. "I want you to have this," she says, and then continues before Eika can protest, "Don't bother buying it, just take this copy. Perks of knowing the author."

Stunned, Eika hesitantly takes reaches for the book, flinching when Sen seizes her wrist before she can pull it back.

"You're a nail biter," she comments, holding up Eika's hand to examine, "You pick at your hands, too."

Eika swallows nervously. "Um. Yes."

"Sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?" Despite her words, Sen smiles and doesn't let go. I'm not criticizing, just noticing. I think a person's flaws and vices make them far more interesting than their good points." She glances back down. "You're in love, and that scares you."

Eika tries not to give much of a reaction, laughing off what she assumes to be a wild guess. "I'm about at the right age for that sort of thing, I suppose."

"But you really are," Sen insists, "Desperately, madly in love. I can tell. It's that look you have sometimes. Like Matsukaze."

When her wrist is released, Eika immediately holds it to her chest reflexively, self-conscious. There are no bruises there anymore; there haven't been for a while. Still, it makes her nervous to have people looking. "It's funny you should mention _Matsukaze_ ," she says shakily, trying to remain polite as she reminds herself that Sen is just a little eccentric, "I was just talking about that play with someone earlier."

"Of course you were." Sen's smile widens. "I'm afraid I'm not quite as well-versed in Noh theater as you are, Miss Ishihara. I've never been able to quite wrap my head around that play."

"Really? Why's that?"

"It's just strange, isn't it?" Sen asks, "It's about two ghosts instead of one, which is a little different. And the ghosts are sisters pining after the same man. That sounds like the setup for a murder reveal, or a jealousy plot. Maybe they secretly poisoned each other, thinking the other wouldn't be so devious, so neither of them won in the end!" She giggles. "Or maybe I just write too much horror to think about it seriously."

Eika shakes her head. "No, I agree, it's slightly atypical for Noh. I think you could compare it to "Mary, Who Knew Too Much," actually. It definitely had your voice, but it was very different from a lot of your work."

"I just really wanted to write about love," Sen confesses, "It's a bit of an obsession for me. I was inspired by you, and by _Matsukaze_ , which I got into not long after our TV interview."

"By me?" Eika repeats incredulously.

"Of course. You were in love then, too, weren't you?" She doesn't give Eika a chance to answer. "Another thing that's been bothering me about that play is the title. Matsukaze is the more important of the two sisters, obviously, she has so many more lines. But in the end, Murasame turns out to have gotten over her love and moves on, leaving Matsukaze all alone on the earthly plane. It seems odd to name it after the sister who gets left behind."

"It's odd that she was left behind at all," Eika points out, "That's another thing that sets it apart from other Noh plays."

Sen takes a long sip of her coffee, giving a contented sigh. "You have that look again," she says, resting her elbows on the table and leaning over her hands, "What are you thinking about right now?"

Eika feels anxious under Sen's scrutiny and has to look away. "Nothing in particular."

"I really am making you uncomfortable, aren't I?" For the first time, Sen actually looks a bit remorseful. "I was touched when you said you wanted to learn from me, you know. I hoped I could give you some advice, but I think I'm just scaring you." She reaches across the table, pen in hand, and opens the front cover of her book to sign her name, writing, "Good luck, my cute junior~" below it. "I don't want you to be afraid of me, Miss Ishihara," Sen says softly, "I want to see you flourish."

In the end, Eika stays much later than she'd intended, talking about literature and life. She still thinks Sen is just guessing, that she can't really know how Eika feels or what she's going through, but sometimes she has to admit that the young woman is eerily perceptive. When they finally go their separate ways, Eika commits the conversation to memory, eager to go home and write another letter to Ken full of things she wants to tell him but can't yet.

She wants to tell him about the things she told Sen, things she still hasn't come to terms yet about her parents and her career as a writer. She wants to tell him about how she feels adrift and frightened sometimes, how she's afraid for herself and for Hinami and for him, too. She wants to tell him about Matsukaze, the sister who was left behind, because she's always read the play in a less literal sense, believing not in two sisters but in one woman who thought she was two, who lost herself to madness and grief and gave up part of herself so she could continue to exist, even if that existence was wrong and warped and was never meant to be.

She means to write all of these things, but she never does, because Eika Ishihara doesn't make it home that night.


	12. PS: I Hope You Never Find These

**I'm on vacation and won't have the opportunity to post next weekend. Apologies in advance.**

* * *

 _They agreed to meet at the edge of the world where Tokyo begins to fade, creeping vines and knotweed tangling around concrete and plaster as though intending to drag it down into the earth. Beneath a bus shelter speckled with moss, he waited, hiding his trembling hands in his coat pockets and watching his breath appear in the winter air before his eyes._

 _She was there suddenly, perhaps having come down the road while his thoughts were still racing._

 _"_ _I didn't think you'd come," the murderer's son said, "Aren't you scared of me?"_

 _The girl shook her head and said no. "I know too much to be afraid anymore."_

 _He wanted to remember this moment; the sound of cicada cries, her sorrowful expression, the shadows they cast blending together on the dirt road. But the scene seemed to disappear before his eyes, swallowed by the harsh light of early evening. He shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun setting on the horizon, haloing her head in gold, but the details were already slipping from his mind even with her standing before him._

 _What sort of jacket was she wearing? What was the color of her eyes, the shape of her nose? What did her voice sound like? It was as though everything about her had melted together into the vague notion of a person rather than anyone in particular, a faceless silhouette against the orange sky with a voice like white noise and a touch like the wind, barely there._

 _"_ _I wanted to see you," she said, "One last time."_

 _He felt betrayed; was this why they had met out here in the wilderness? Had she lied when she claimed she felt no fear? He had believed in her and her gentle touch, believed they would find peace together that they never had alone. "You want to leave me," he said quietly, resigned._

 _His mother had told him once that love did not come easy, that it had to be seized by the throat when it reared its head and pinned to corkboard with a nail through the heart, like a stag beetle or a butterfly. It had to be preserved under glass and admired from afar, and it could never come out of its box or it would begin to decay little by little, until nothing was left but blackened ash and rot._

 _He didn't want to believe her, but her words were always at the back of his mind, reverberating from the past. He knew he should have listened._

 _"_ _You want to abandon what we have." He shook his head. "But you can't. I won't let you."_

 _And the figure before him, the prototypical idea of a lover caught out of the corner of one's eye, seemed to turn to the sky. "What will you do?" she asked, "Will you tie me down? Will you kill me?"_

 _The murderer's son did not answer._

 _"_ _You can't do that," she said sadly._

 _When she turned to look at him, he thought he caught just a glimpse of her face._

 _"_ _You can't," she repeated, "Not again."_

 _And when he blinked, he found himself standing beneath the bus shelter all alone, cicadas like a chorus of mourning as he sat on the old wooden bench and held his head in his hands. They had met here one last time, hadn't they? That hadn't been a dream, had it?_

 _The soil behind the shelter was uneven, the grass above it greener than the surrounding foliage. The murderer's son knelt and pressed his palms to the earth, and if he closed his eyes, he thought he could still feel her heart beating beneath his hands._

 _He smiled; it was not a dream._

— _Mary, Who Knew Too Much_

* * *

Eika's scent still lingers in her apartment.

Ken shivers and clutches one of her jackets tighter, pressing his nose into the fabric from where he sits on the floor. Everything is just as he remembers—stacks of library books on the desk with stray assignments sticking out of them, bed unmade, curtains drawn—frozen in time. But it's too quiet, lacking the tapping of her fingers across the keyboard or the drip of the coffee machine or the sound of her heartbeat. He can't hear her breathing, can't feel her body heat, can't hold her.

He takes another deep breath and tries to calm down.

Tsukiyama thought it might be too early to know for certain. "Are you sure she didn't have to go do a book tour or something?"

"She would've told me," Ken had insisted, "She wouldn't have just disappeared like this. Something must be wrong."

He'd known right away, because he'd waited for her at home after the trip to the bookstore, given her plenty of time by walking Hinami home to the 6th ward before coming all the way back, but when he peered through the balcony doors, he saw that the lights were off and no one was inside. So he'd let himself in and sat on the bed, helping himself to some coffee and a Yoko Tawada novel lying face-down on the desk, only able to get through a fourth of the book before he was too worried to sit still.

"We can help you find her!" Hinami announced the next morning, intending to rope the rest of the household in without explicitly asking, but none of them were inclined to refuse.

Ken had stayed at her apartment all night, waiting, unable to even sleep when every creak of the stairs and neighbor passing by outside made his heart race, only to slow again in disappointment when the pace of their footsteps or their scent was all wrong.

 _Where is she?_ he'd wondered, curiosity turning to panic. _Where is she?_

 _Is she coming back?_

He spent a whole day tearing the 20th ward apart with his heart in his throat and all of the fears he'd forgotten he had rushing back at once. Hinami had done her best, but even her keen sense of smell was limited by distance, and a sweep of Kamii University and the neighboring areas yielded only dead ends. She'd promised to do better, said she'd wake up early the next day so they could search the rest of town, and Ken was eager to try again but found himself back at her apartment in his restlessness, and the others allowed him his space.

He didn't want them to see him like this.

Slowly, he pulls himself up from the floor, still holding the jacket—he thought he had her scent memorized by now, but it's not enough, not enough that he feels confident anymore, and he can't forget now—and wanders over to her desk, one trembling hand reaching out to pull books from the piles and examining their covers.

Tomioka's _Building Waves_ , Soseki's _And Then_ , Tanizaki's _Naomi_ —Dazai's _No Longer Human_ is there, as well, at the bottom of the pile, and he caresses the cover fondly—the world of things that brought them together a lifetime ago, when he was still weak and learning, when she wore long sleeves and shrunk away when he tried to help.

 _The antonym,_ he thinks desperately, _What was the antonym of farewell?_

He can't remember what she told him anymore.

He notices as he makes his way through the books on the desk that there's a sheet of notebook paper tucked into the front cover of a copy of her memoir, neatly folded in half, her handwriting filling even the margins. Curiously, he opens it up.

 _June 18_ _th_

 _Dear Ken Kaneki,_

 _Tsukiyama and I text each other a lot lately. I think he just isn't sure who else to talk to. From the way he talks, I get the impression that he doesn't really feel he can confide in Banjou and his friends, and I know he'd rather not worry Hinami. I want to say that we're all coddling her, and that she could stand for us to be honest with her, or at little more straightforward, but whenever I spend time with her, I just want to tell her that everything will be alright. I've been lying more and more recently._

He doesn't feel like he should be reading it; it's one of the letters she never meant for him to see. Part of him wants to read the rest, but part of him would rather wait for her to come home and say however much she wants to say.

Because she _is_ going to come home. She has to. This is where she belongs. If he waits, she'll be here, just like always.

Ken chokes on a sob and the letter crinkles in his hands, a few pencil marks blurring together as his tears wet the page.

* * *

Ken knows something's wrong when Banjou comes to get him.

Not Tsukiyama, who always comes too soon and steps on his toes, managing to say just the wrong thing, and not Hinami, who always come later after everyone else has given up.

"Kaneki," he says from outside Eika's balcony doors, knocking gently on the glass.

Ken untangles himself from Eika's bedsheets; he actually slept last night, unable to keep his eyes open any longer, curled up in her scent, and he could imagine he was holding her like that, could imagine it wasn't just the warmth of his own kagune but her beside him. He rubs his eyes, red with exhaustion, and drags over to the balcony to pull the curtains aside, trying to ignore the sympathetic look in Banjou's eyes as he opens the door.

"Kaneki, it's," but the older ghoul stops, looking at the floor.

Ken lets the silence hang there for a moment, unwilling to hear the inevitable. "It's what?"

Banjou takes a deep breath. "You've just…you have to come home," he says uneasily, "I can't even explain. You just have to see it."

"Have you found out where Eika is?"

"Well…no…." When Ken begins to turn away, he stammers, "But, look, this is related to that, alright? And it's…it's bad, okay? Tsukiyama and I are looking into it, but—!"

"Is she alive?" Ken cuts him off.

Banjou nods.

He's never been home faster. Banjou struggles to keep up, trying to stay out of sight as they traverse residential rooftops and corporate towers across Tokyo, but Ken hardly cares. The rest of the household is gathered in the living room standing around the coffee table, muttering nervously. Tsukiyama's on the phone with someone. Hinami sits on the couch, rubbing at her eyes as her shoulders tremble.

They don't notice Ken come in until he clears his throat, and then Sante is throwing himself in the way and trying to block his view of the table while Ichimi babbles out something about not expecting him back so soon.

"Stop it," Jiro snaps, "Let him see."

Sante bites his lip but does as he's told, moving to the side. Ken reaches down to pick up a small paper square on the table, furrowing his brows in confusion until he realizes what he's looking at.

It's a polaroid photograph of a dark room, the flash illuminating grime and dark red stains in the corners. Eika—and he knows it's her, there's no mistaking it, even with her braids unraveled and her eyes covered with a blindfold, it's her—sits in the center of the room, tied to a chair. Along the bottom of the polaroid, the words, " _Does this become her?"_ are scrawled in pen.

Ken feels bile rising. Cold tendrils of helplessness slide along his spine.

"We'll figure something out," he hears Banjou say quietly, "I swear."

Tsukiyama leaves the room, still on the phone, but his voice still drifts in from the kitchen, "That's not what I asked. Do you or don't you know anyone involved in human trafficking operations? It doesn't matter that the Restaurant is gone, I know the other locations haven't shut down."

"We know people," Banjou goes on, "All that hard work you did setting up connections around here is really going to pay off. I know a guy who keeps close tabs on territory disputes, and—!"

"It wasn't just some random ghoul," Ken says lowly, "And it wasn't the Ghoul Restaurant." His hands are shaking again. "This was planned a long time in advance by someone who knew her, and knew that I knew her." He sets the picture back down on the table. "We're going to find whoever did this," he says, trying to make sure his voice doesn't betray how he feels, but he knows he's trembling, feels himself instinctively cracking the joints in his hands, one finger at a time, "And I'm going to hurt them. Again and again and again."

"We'll find them," Banjou agrees, but Ken hardly hears him.

In his mind, he's already in the room with whoever's responsible, his heart racing as a contented smile stretches across his face, and the scent of blood is overpowering.

* * *

On the fourth day, a picture comes of Eika with one of Aogiri Tree's masks covering her face.

" _Neither Zo-onna nor Ryo-onna,_ " the caption reads, " _This is a masked reserved for the part of those not long for this world."_

Ken nearly tears it into pieces, but just sets it down in the end, unwilling to destroy anything that bears her image.

A week goes by, and Ken concedes that the kidnappers are smarter than he gave them credit for.

Of course it's Aogiri Tree, he thinks bitterly. One of their operatives must have been following them both for weeks, maybe longer. He's upset that any of them got out of the 11th ward base alive; had he known this would have happened, he would have stayed to hunt each and every one of them down, _tore their kagune from their screaming bodies and eaten them alive._

Every day that he can't find her, another polaroid appears, stuck in the mailbox or dropped on the porch, appearing when nobody's looking. The room gets dirtier as the days go by, rat corpses strewn around the chair. Eika is crying in one picture, teardrops darkening her blindfold and running down her cheeks.

 _"_ _Your life is not a tragedy,"_ this one says, " _It is not a Noh play. It is a comedy, and we're all laughing."_

"Kaneki, we've got a lead," Banjou says, but he doesn't get too close.

Ken sets the photo down on the table at the far right, snapshots of Eika Ishihara for the past few days that he clings to.

"Go ahead without me," he tells the other ghoul, "Let me know what you find."

It isn't fair to say that he's pessimistic. He believes Eika will be found—she must be, she will be, that is his reality, the way that his story will go, he's already decided—but not yet, he thinks, that's not the way Aogiri Tree works. There must be something they want, something they're expecting. Banjou and Tsukiyama and Hinami will look, but they'll find nothing. It has to be him, and it has to be at the right time.

When Banjou's footsteps retreat and he hears the front door open and close, he feels he has time to think. What could it be? What are they after?

"The antonym of concealment," he says, pausing. What would Eika say here? Clarity, he thinks; no, he knows. He knows she would say that, he's certain of it. "The antonym of concealment is clarity." The photos of Eika Ishihara stand in a line, and she looks close enough to touch. Ken reaches out, brushes his fingertips against the glossy surface, and imagines warmth.

The ghoul he dragged in the previous night—still alive, still writhing and wheezing, blood clogging its throat and fear in its eyes—lies still beside the couch, chunks torn out of its throat and limbs and dried blood caking the carpet.

 _"_ _What do we do?" Banjou had hissed in the other room, but Ken still heard him._

 _Tsukiyama had hesitated before answering. "Nothing. Let him do what he wants. Maybe it makes him feel better."_

 _"_ _His binge-eating is worse than usual. This is the fourth time he's left, just tonight, but he's never brought them home like this."_

 _"_ _Do you really want to get in his way?"_

 _Neither of them spoke after that, and Ken enjoyed his meal in silence._

* * *

"Kaneki," Hinami says softly, "Do you want to talk?"

He doesn't look at her, sprawled on his back over the couch and tracing patterns on the ceiling with his eyes. "There's nothing to talk about," he says hollowly.

And it's true. Eika's return is not negotiable, not something they need to talk about. Soon, everything will go back to the way it's supposed to be. He's stopped going with them on searches, certain it won't change anything, because nothing can be done.

She'll come back.

She has to.

He hears the door shut, rolls onto his side, and shivers.

* * *

Ken finds her, just as he knew he would.

The others sit in the next room, speaking in hushed tones as they always do. He thinks they must be afraid of him.

"They're your friends," Eika says from the chair across from him, hands folded in her lap, "They aren't afraid of you."

"Everyone is afraid of me," he laments, "Everyone."

"I'm not."

He hears Banjou mumble, "No luck in southern Tokyo. I thought for sure something'd turn up, since they used to have a base there."

"We must have missed something," Tsukiyama insists, "There must be something we're overlooking. Hinami was certain she picked up on Eika's scent there."

"Maybe I made a mistake," Hinami says quietly.

"Don't doubt yourself, you'd know if it was her or not."

Ken looks down at the photos—twenty-two in total, overexposed, colors faded. "Why not?" he asks.

Eika smiles. "Because I know too much." She stands up and walks to him, silent, and holds up her hands. Ken laces their fingers together and closes his eyes.

"They act like you're not here."

"They wouldn't know," she insists, "They don't know me like you do."

He inhales and smells her all around him, as sweet as always.

* * *

Ken reads "Zoo" again; she asks him to with a smile, leaning against his shoulder on the couch.

"Don't you remember?" Rize's specter taunts him, clinging to his other shoulder, nails sinking into his skin, "This is a story about stagnation. The protagonist is a weak-minded fool who can't accept what's happened." He tries to ignore her, but she bends to whisper in his ear, her breath cold but tempting with the scent of blood. "If you ignore it, then your story will never be a tragedy."

Ken takes a shaky breath, trying to read through his tear-filled, blurry vision.

Rize giggles. "It'll just be a _lie_."

* * *

The last polaroid arrives a few days later, an image of Eika lying on the blood-covered floor facing away from the camera, unbound. " _You can have her back now, if you still want her,"_ is written along the bottom.

On the back is an address.


	13. PS: You'll Have to Remind Me

"Everyone's saying it's a publicity stunt."

They're trying to keep their voices down, but she can still hear them from the bedroom, their voices drifting up through an air vent. Eika Ishihara—or so they've been calling her—thinks she might know these people, might have spent time with them at some point, but she can't say for certain. There's little that she _is_ certain of, like who they are or where she is or why she's there.

And who she herself is, for that matter.

"Can you believe it? Talk about insensitive! As far as they know, she's still missing, and people assume it's just a ploy to boost book sales."

The curtains are drawn over the glass panels of the windows and the balcony door, and the lights are off. Eika lays on her side in bed and tries to think of things that she does remember; the opening lines of _The_ _Tale of the Heike,_ the structure of a Noh play, influences on the ero-guro nonsense movement. None of it is particularly helpful.

She hears footsteps ascending the stairs, slow and hesitant. She sits up in anticipation of a visitor, reaching over to the bedside table for her glasses. It turns out to be the boy with silver hair, and she feels again that she should know this person, feels her heart beating faster and all of the tension leaving her body but she doesn't know why.

"Oh, good, you're awake," he says, smiling at her.

It's a tired smile, she thinks, and something about it is sad.

"Did you want something to eat?"

She shakes her head. "I was hoping I could go home now." Home has the answers, she thinks. Wherever home is, there's someone there who can tell her what she's missing.

The boy looks away for the first time. "Not just yet," he says. He inches a bit closer, just a couple steps, carefully like he doesn't want to scare her. His hands are shaking. He's keeping secrets from her.

"Why not?" she presses, "You told me yesterday that you were trying to find my family." She fists her hands in the sheets and looks down at them, smiling nervously. "Do you…not really know who I am, either?"

"No," the boy says firmly, and suddenly he's standing right beside the bed, looking down at Eika with a pained expression, "I know exactly who you are." She scoots back a bit apprehensively when he decides to sit down on the edge of the bed. "Why don't' we talk about that for a little bit?" he offers, "Maybe I can jog your memory."

Eika hesitates. "I'm a little curious about you, too," she says, "How do you know me?"

The boy's smile becomes strained. "We've known each other for a few years," he says vaguely, "We both like literature. That's actually how we met."

"Really?"

He nods. "At a café. I was working there, you came in for some coffee. You were carrying _The Wild Geese_ , and I was curious about that."

"Curious?" Eika echoes.

"Well, yeah. I liked to think I could tell a lot about a person by what books they read. I thought you must relate to it; you were feeling trapped by something."

It sounds right, somehow. "What was I trapped by?" she asks.

The boy doesn't answer right away. He looks at the floor for a moment. "You never told me," he says hesitantly, scratching at his chin.

Eika is afraid, afraid of this room and these people she doesn't recognize, but something about this feels familiar to her, like she's done this before, spoken to him and confided in him.

She knows him. She's sure of it.

"What's your name?" she asks.

His smile returns, brighter this time. "Ken Kaneki."

She nods. "Then, Kaneki, could you tell me about myself?"

He comes closer again, nearly sitting beside her against the headboard, but she doesn't mind. "Well, you're a writer," he begins, and she thinks she feels his hand bump into hers as he settles in. She doesn't know exactly what her relationship with this boy is, but she catches herself staring at his profile and wondering, face flushing as she turns away.

Ken Kaneki stays with her for hours and gives her bits and pieces—that she's a first year at Kamii University, a lit major, a fan of Dazai—and Eika holds onto each one as something precious.

* * *

 _She remembers a dark place before this one, a metal chair, soreness in her wrists, the chill in the air. She remembers, but she doesn't know why. It was empty and silent, with nothing and no one but her, unable to move, unable to see, unable to do anything but sit and wait. It might've been a nightmare; it might've been a memory._

 _Either way, it's behind her now._

* * *

Shuu Tsukiyama—a man who never seems too far away, ever present when Ken calls on him to run an errand or meet with someone—tells her both more and less, sitting with her at the kitchen table as she eats an instant meal.

"I don't know you as well as I know Kaneki," he admits, "But I can tell you that he saved your life once, and you saved his."

Kazuichi Banjou, who is not as fearsome as he looks, nods in agreement. "It's true, you've supported each other a lot, despite everything."

When he says _"despite everything,"_ he means the book beside her plate, _From the Brink of Despair: A Memoir_ on the cover and her name below it. She wrote this, she's told, but thumbing through it fills her with confusion rather than recognition. This person called Eika Ishihara sounds unpleasant and gloomy, writing so passively about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father as if she, too, was detached from it all, like she didn't really know who she was, either.

"Does reading that remind you of anything?" Ken urges, sitting directly across from her.

She looks up at him, hesitating before she says, "It's hard to believe this was me. I feel like I'm reading about someone else." _Who, in turn, was writing about someone else._

She sees, for the first time, a flicker of impatience across his face, but it's gone in seconds, replaced by a tranquil smile. "That's alright," he says, "I'm sure it'll all come back soon enough."

"It looks like I can't talk to my parents for help," Eika says, glancing back down at the pages of her memoir, "But you did say I'm a student at Kamii. Shouldn't I be in class right now?"

Ken silently reaches for her hands across the table, holding them gently with his own and running his eyes over her skin. She follows his gaze, unsure of what he's looking for. "No," he says finally, "This is where you belong."

"I'm sure there are people who are wondering where I am," she insists, leaning back to slip out of his grasp, but he holds on tighter and leans forward, lowering his voice.

"You can't leave," he says, quiet panic tinging his words.

"Kaneki," Banjou murmurs, hand hovering over the boy's shoulder, "You're going to scare her."

"She can't leave the house," Ken says, turning to look at the other two, "Do you understand? If I'm not here, you have to make sure she doesn't go anywhere."

Eika tears herself out of his grip and stumbles back from the table, knocking her chair over, backing herself up against the wall in fear. They're lying, she thinks, they must be lying about Ken Kaneki when they say she knew him and cared about him. "I just want to get back to my life," she says angrily.

Ken rounds on her, eyes narrowing in anger, and one changes from a tranquil gray to a frightening red, the whites of his eyes filling with black. Eika covers her mouth as she gasps, horrified. "You don't even remember who you are!" he exclaims, "If you go out there, you're just going to get yourself killed."

"Did you always act like this?" she shoots back, "Trap me and treat me like a child? You're just like the father in the memoir—!"

She doesn't see him move, but suddenly he's right in front of her, one hand slamming into the wall beside her head, eyes wide in anger. "I am _nothing_ like him," he growls, "He only ever hurt you; I tried to help."

Eika trembles, trapped between the frightening boy—the ghoul? He must be, but why not both eyes?—and the wall, biting her lip as tears threaten to spill. "The boy in the memoir is nothing like you," she hisses.

Ken reels back as though she hit him, looking away. She tenses in apprehension, expecting retaliation of some sort, but it never comes. Instead, his eye fades back to normal and he glances back at her once over his shoulder before he walks away, going down the hall and slamming the door to one of the rooms behind him. Tsukiyama, too, leaves, and Banjou lingers to open and close his mouth, like he keeps trying to think of things to say, but eventually he just stares silently at the surface of the table.

Eika takes the memoir and goes back upstairs. The house is silent for the rest of the day.

* * *

In the evening, there's a commotion downstairs as she hears a new voice—a young girl, by the sound of it—and eventually someone knocks timidly on the door to her room.

(Her cage.)

"Eika!" the girl says as she leaps onto the bed and throws her arms around Eika in a frantic hug, "I was so scared when we couldn't find you! Ken said I shouldn't talk to you right now, but I told him I really, _really_ wanted to, so he let me." She releases Eika to look up at her with a pitying gaze. "He said you don't remember us. Is that true?"

Eika sees the girl's excitement fading with each second that she hesitates to answer. "I'm sorry," she feels she has to say, "I don't even remember who I am very well."

"That's okay," the girl says, forcing a smile, "We'll just start over. I'm Hinami. And the people living here are Mr. Banjou and the Flower Man, and Ichimi and Jiro and Sante, and Ken. Ken is the one you really like." Eika tries to ask a question but Hinami continues, "And you're Eika. You're really nice and you wrote a book. A long time ago, Ken had to leave and you were really sad because you didn't know where he went. Then, just a little bit ago, he didn't know where you were, and he was really sad."

Hinami looks away sadly, picks at some lint on her skirt. "If it's just something like that," she mumbles, "It's easy to fix. When you find the person you like, you're happy again. But I don't know how to fix this. I just want everyone to be happy again."

The room falls silent for some time. Eika doesn't know what to say—she barely knows who the Hinami is—but she manages to ask, "What kind of things did I do, other than write?"

"You told me about lots of good stories," Hinami says, "I didn't go to school so I'm bad at reading, but Ken helped me get better. And then you would read with me and teach me about things I didn't understand."

"Why don't we do that?"

Hinami's eyes widen. "You want to?"

Eika nods.

The girl looks like she might cry. She gives Eika another hug before exclaiming that she'll be right back, scurrying out of the room and back down the stairs. In the time it takes her to return, Eika again hears mumbling through the air vent, but this time it's Tsukiyama and Ken speaking to one another.

"So far, only the police investigation is active," Tsukiyama says, "The CCG hasn't gotten involved because they don't see any reason to link the case to ghoul activity. That being said, she'll likely be spotted if she goes outside, so I think you're making the right call."

"I'm rethinking it," Ken mutters, "Maybe this is a good time to let her go."

There's a pause. "What do you mean?"

"I mean do what I did with the others. Hide and Touka and everyone at Anteiku. Maybe it's better this way; she won't miss me."

"I don't think that's true."

"You heard her," Ken says bitterly, "I'm not like the boy in the memoir. She doesn't have any reason to stick around."

"Kaneki," Tsukiyama says, "You don't really want to do that."

"Of course I don't. But it's the right thing to do."

Hinami startles Eika when she returns, a large, yellowed text under one arm, and she plops down on the bed beside Eika and showing her the cover. "I borrowed this one from the library," she says, "It's got a bunch of Noh plays in it. If you forgot them, then we can learn them again together. You really like Noh."

Eika stares down at the cover illustration, half of a frightful-looking antique Noh mask of a woman's face that leers at her with an amused smile.

"You told me," Hinami says proudly, "That this mask is called _zo-onna_."

For some reason, she remembers this.

"Okay, let's read this one. It's called Matsukaze. It was actually performed last weekend, right here in town."

This is familiar. Sitting with Hinami and listening to her read, helping her with the difficult words and explaining the symbolism of pine trees and stag cries—things she hasn't lost somehow—is, for whatever reason, comforting. She feels at peace and at home.

 _"_ _Being with you and Ken is like being with my mom and dad."_

 _"_ _I just want all of us to be happy and never be sad again."_

Eika doesn't know why, but suddenly she feels like crying.

* * *

 _Some nights she is there again, and all she can think of is how afraid she is, how alone and how helpless, and angry, angry that there's nothing she can do._

 _"_ _You're quite unlucky," someone whispers right against her ear, and she startles because it's the first voice she's heard in so long. The blindfold around her eyes blocks out everything but the faintest hint of dull orange, light on the other side of her eyelids, harsh and flickering. "If you didn't know Ken Kaneki, you wouldn't be here."_

 _Her whole body stiffens at the mention of the boy's name. Slender fingers come to rest on her shoulders, running down her arms to hold her wrists, the firm, unrelenting grip making her nervous and she squirms instinctively._

 _"_ _He's who I'm really aiming for, after all. This is just a way for me to help him along his path. He's been stagnating lately, refusing to let his own story unfold, but that'll change after this," her captor goes on, "So there's no reason for me to ensure your survival."_

 _Eika takes a shuddering breath, trying not to cry._

 _"_ _But," she hears, and then a soft chuckle, "This could be the start of a story of your own, couldn't it? If I were to name a genre, I'd say…"_

 _The grip on her wrists tightens; she feels something like cloth or bandages._

 _"_ _It'll definitely be a tragedy."_

* * *

Several days go by in the house of almost-strangers.

Ken Kaneki alternates between keeping his distance and not wanting to be too far. Eika might be on the living room couch with a book in her lap—either one of Hinami's, or a signed copy of _The Black Goat's Egg_ that she found in her bag—when the boy will walk in and silently take a seat just a cushion or two away, sometimes with a cup of coffee in hand, sometimes doing nothing but sitting there.

And Eika doesn't know what to say when this happens because she still doesn't know what to make of him. He's frightening and unpredictable, leaving and returning at odd hours with mysterious red stains on his clothes that she tries not to think about. If he meant to harm her, surely he would've done it already, but that doesn't completely put her at ease.

"You want to go home, right?" Ken asks this time, catching her off-guard.

Eika eyes him cautiously. "I don't really have a home, do I?"

"You know what I mean." Now he can't look at her. "Back to your own place. Back to school, and your own life."

"Would you let me go?"

He shrugs. "If you really want to."

"Would that make you upset?"

Ken doesn't answer.

"Hinami told me," she says hesitantly, "That we've each done this to each other once now. Disappeared, I mean. I missed you when you were gone, and you missed me."

"You don't remember that."

Eika shakes her head. "But I believe her."

The boy meets her eyes at last with an unreadable expression on his face. "You know," he says, "You used to write me letters when you didn't know where I was. Whatever you didn't get to tell me you wrote down. Even when I came back, you kept writing them." He takes a deep breath, anxiously popping the joints in his fingers. "Could I ask you to keep doing that?"

She blinks in surprise.

"Even if you don't really remember me," he mumbles, "Even if you don't want anything to do with me after this, just keep writing down the things you want to say. You told me it helped you."

 _"_ _I was just trying to make sense of you not being around anymore."_

 _"_ _I wrote letters when I had bad days to tell you about it."_

She remembers saying those words and feeling his arms around her. Heat rises to her face. "I'll keep writing them," she promises, "Maybe someday I'll show them to you."

Ken shakes his head. "She wouldn't have wanted that."

"Who?"

"You," he says, "Who you were before."

Eika looks down at the table sadly. "I said something cruel to you the other day, and I'm sorry. Of course you're not who you were before, you've probably been through a lot and changed, just like me."

"Eika," Ken says gently, drawing closer, "It's alright. I understand. I'm sorry for scaring you." He covers one of her hands with his own, staring down at his black nails with uncertainty. "When you leave," he says, "You can't tell anyone about me or Hinami or any of us, alright? Just like in the memoir, where you never used my name or described me. Just keep us a secret."

Eika doesn't ask why; for some reason, she feels like the right thing to do is nod. "I won't say anything. I promise."

"And don't try to find us," Ken goes on, "Don't come back here, and if you see us somewhere, don't call out to us. I'm involved in a lot of dangerous things, and I want you to be safe." He takes a shaky breath, his free hand rising to her face to stroke her cheek. Eika flinches at first but it's a pleasant feeling, another thing she thinks she recalls.

 _Being this close. Looking him in the eye. A chaste kiss in a coffee shop._

"And, if it's not too much to ask," he says hoarsely, "Try to remember me. Just that I exist, and that I care about you."

He leans in hesitantly, stopping just short of pressing his lips against hers. Eika doesn't know what comes over her but she throws her arms around her neck and closes what distance remains. Ken is warm, his hands on her sides reassuring, touch gentle. She's kissing a stranger, she thinks hysterically, but she tells herself that's simply not the case.

Ken Kaneki is not a stranger. He doesn't tell her anything more about himself during the rest of her stay, but she feels certain of this.

* * *

 **Sorry it's two updates in a row, but I will be out of town again next weekend!**


	14. PS: I Don't Want It to End Like This

_Sometimes the genesis of a story is not a plot but a character, the nebulous concept of an individual. Where do they come from? What drives them? Who has been kind to them, and who has hurt them? What will they do now? Everything I write is rooted in reality, no matter how fantastic or horrible it might seem, because these fantastic and horrible things could be possible, so sometimes my inspiration, too, is from reality._

 _I first met Miss Eika Ishihara during our television interview in the spring, and I remember wanting desperately to know more about her. A memoir is supposed to be a work of brutal and beautiful honesty, but I felt that there was so much she didn't say in those pages, so much left unanswered. I can't say we knew each other well, and I can't claim to be a close friend, but her disappearance greatly affected me and my work. In a way, this short story is dedicated to her, the idea of her, the person I conjured from memory and the young woman who actually sat at my reading and whom admired me as much as I admired her._

 _Although Miss Ishihara has been found, I would like everyone to read this story with those kinds of feelings in mind, that loss and that emptiness. I think she's struggling with those very emotions right now. As a fellow writer, I hope I can persuade her fans to understand what she is going through, and to encourage them to look forward to the future rather than dwell on the past. Like the protagonist of this story, sometimes looking back and groping blindly in the dark is futile, and the only option is to press on ahead, even if you can't recall what you're leaving behind._

 _Miss Ishihara, this one is for you._

 _—_ _Sen Takatsuki, from the forward of her new novel,_ Tokyo Amnesia

* * *

In the end, everything is chalked up to an accident.

There is still some uncertainty, of course, talk of attempted abductions and torture and ghouls, because ghouls are at the heart of every good conspiracy theory. But Eika Ishihara still gets her peace in the end, thousands of letters of condolences pouring in with a variety of formulaic "get well soon" messages scrawled across them. She doesn't know these people, but they claim to be her readers, people she inspired and people she saved and people who wish her well, and it's all a bit overwhelming so she has to read the letters a few at a time before she takes a break.

When she isn't reading them, she's reading a different set of letters, ones in her own handwriting addressed to a boy she's not supposed to look for but is expected to remember, though his face is already leaving her. _Dear Ken Kaneki,_ they all begin, a desperate cry or a heartfelt confession below. Was she really such a lonesome person?

"Eika, dinner's ready," her mother calls from the other side of the door.

It was hard to adjust to calling a stranger mother, but she warmed up to it after the first few weeks. It had been a day or two after she'd reappeared—dropped off by the silver-haired boy at the train station in the 20th ward with a bag full of what seemed to be her library books and one of Sen Takatsuki's special edition releases, signed especially to her—that everything began to change rapidly. A passerby recognized her face and soon enough she was at the nearest police box struggling to answer questions while her sudden reappearance and amnesia made headlines. That's when this dark-haired woman appeared, wrapped her arms around her, and told her to come home.

But Eika is still confused. The memoir made it seem like they really weren't that close, like she held some resentment even though they'd both been victims. Regardless, she decides to treat the memoir as a work of experimental fiction and stop trying to live from it—she'd rather not be the girl in it, anyway.

"Another station called for an interview today while you were at school," the woman—her mother, she reminds herself—says, setting a plate of grilled fish and vegetables down for both of them and going to sit across from her. "I told them I'd have to get back to them. I wasn't sure how you'd feel about that."

"I don't have a lot of time right now," Eika says, "My advisor's been very generous about helping me receive credit for the time I missed. I want to focus on school right now, and maybe my next book."

Her mother smiles brightly. "So you _are_ working on something." She looks proud; Eika looks away shyly, but feels her heart swell with happiness. "What is it?"

"It's still just an idea," she admits, "But I want to do something kind of surreal, maybe inspired by Noh theater."

"That sounds wonderful."

It must, Eika thinks, anything that isn't bad news must sound wonderful. She feels a bit guilty for how much trouble she's given her mother, how many trips she's already had to see a therapist, the nightmares that wake them both in the night with her screaming, the moments of hysteric melancholy that make her shut herself in her room and cry on the floor. "Pieces of the old you," her mother reassures her every time, "Things that are just weighing you down. It'll get better. Time will go by, and that'll all go away. Just be yourself, and don't worry about any of that." They don't talk about the memoir, both content to pretend it never happened, and everything else is just fine.

 _It's not fine. Nothing is fine. This woman is just trying to save her own skin, just wants to clear her conscience and pretend she has always done the right thing. Forgiving her is foolishness. Forgiving her is_ weakness.

"Eika?" her mother asks, frowning now, a concerned look on her face.

Eika blinks. "Huh?"

"I asked if you wanted some more rice."

"Oh." She looks down at her own plate and finds it nearly empty. She doesn't remember eating it. "Oh, no, that's okay. Sorry, I think I'm tired."

"Of course," her mother says gently, "You've been working so hard. Go ahead and study, I'll bring you a snack in a little while. And don't stay up too late."

Eika smiles. "I won't," she promises, standing and heading for the stairs.

 _I ran up these stairs so many times in search of somewhere to hide._

A printed and corrected rough draft of an essay on the play _Matsukaze_ sits on her desk, her professor's notes in the margins in bright red. "Expand on this," he asks where she introduces the idea that Matsukaze is the original person and Murasame a mental construct. It isn't anything revolutionary, but it is a new spin, perhaps, on the idea that the two characters are really one and the same. It's something she's thought about a lot lately.

Matsukaze is who she was, who came before, and the person she is now is Murasame. But it isn't like the play at all; she's the one who remains, after all, and not the original. Is that right? Is that healthy?

 _Is that even really possible?_

She opens her laptop to begin work on a revised draft but her gaze wanders to the basket in the corner holding all of her fan mail, knowing there's a distinct stack buried underneath the rest with a rubber band holding them together. Against her better judgment and maybe even pulled by something that isn't her own will, she finds herself going to get it, setting the basket on her desk and digging through the letters for the ones she wants.

"Dear Ken Kaneki," the first one she lays her hands on begins, "I've made yet another excuse to avoid meeting with Nagachika. On the surface, he seems to be your opposite, but he really is thoughtful and a bit devious. I'm certain that he knows we're meeting now, that I'm withholding information from him, but I don't see any reason to worry you further with this information. You'll do what you must when you feel you're able. That's what you'd say, in not so many words, anyway. Nagachika is desperate to find you, maybe even thinks he can help you, and I might be putting myself in danger by getting in his way. He really thinks he knows what's best for you, I'm sure.

But I'm also sure."

It gives her chills to read these, seeing things that she must've written at some point but sound nothing like her. What kind of life did she lead, she wonders, and her imagination runs wild. This is something that causes a bit of distress, but it also fills a gap somewhere inside of her, an aching emptiness that she thinks of whenever she realizes she doesn't remember anything about herself and she just wants to know who she is.

"If it makes you sad to think about, then don't think about it," her mother would say, "You deserve to be happy. Focus on today, and on tomorrow. Focus on what makes you happy." Everyone says things like that; in the letters and on campus and in the therapist's office, everyone tells her that it's okay if she doesn't remember, that she should build an identity around what she knows for certain rather than things that are meaningless from yesterdays she can't recall, and she's usually inclined to agree.

But every now and then, she indulges just a bit in the "what ifs," in these letters from her past self to the boy—and to the future, and really, to her, the Murasame to her former Matsukaze—and she wonders.

* * *

 _Dear Ken Kaneki,_ she hears in her sleep, in dreams where she stands behind herself, watching a girl who looks just like her and sounds just like her with a boy, and she can't see either of their faces. They lay in a field of gardenias and forget-me-nots, white and pale blue dotting the ground, and they wrap around one another, bleed into one another, connect so she can no longer see where one begins and one ends.

 _Ken,_ the girl who must be her whispers, his name like a mantra spilling from her lips. She sounds mad, and she sounds like she's in love, and she doesn't cry out when the boy becomes a centipede, wrapping his snake-like body around her legs and biting her shoulder hard enough for blood to come spilling out, soiling the ground and the flowers beneath them. She bites him back, shatters his carapace and reveals pale skin underneath, digs her hands into his half-human body and tries to tear him apart, and he speaks her name in pained murmurs.

 _Eika,_ he says, and even without a face she feels as though he's looking at her with centipede eyes, pitch-black like bottomless voids.

The flowers beneath them aren't crushed as they write together; the gardenia aren't stained red, nor do the forget-me-nots turn indigo, splattered with blood. Whatever they touch begins to die, shriveling and blackening and leaving nothing but rot and decay, the scent of blood, cold and wet ruins like bodies underfoot, and Eika—she means herself, she thinks she means herself, she doesn't know who she is anymore—feels something crack inside of her.

* * *

"It's going to be a horror story," Eika tells her academic advisor the next time she's in his office, finishing up another appointment where they discuss her next steps. For all of the things she seems to have forgotten, she remembers books just fine, able to write papers on things she read long before the passing.

(The passing over her old self, that is. That's what she's calling it, just like Murasame passed from this world, leaving only the unstable Matsukaze behind without the tempering force of her constructed persona. Even though it's just the opposite for her, she feels it's appropriate.

She's starting to think she was far more complicated than she realized. She's not sure she likes that, but it's too late to go back now.)

"I thought it was going to be a romance," her advisor jokes, "You told me that, but I didn't really take you seriously. You're not the romance type."

"Why didn't you tell me that?"

He waves a hand passively. "Who am I to tell you what you are or aren't? If you decide you're a romance writer now, that's fine."

Eika laughs. "Well, you were right. I'm not the type for romance."

"Is this going to be a short story or a novel?"

"Something short. It's a little bit of an impulsive story."

"What's it about?"

She smiles absently. "Centipedes."

She's had them on her mind lately. Yesterday, she found one crawling around in her mother's garden by a pear tree and sat to watch it forage for almost half an hour.

 _It's fate,_ something inside of her was saying, _It's destiny._

In its wriggling feelers and skittering legs, she saw something she missed.

When she gets home, she tries to return her mother's welcoming hug but it must feel stiff and false because the woman steps back and frowns. "What's wrong?" she asks, "Was school a little rough today?"

"Kind of," she lies, and the lie comes so easily she's almost startled. It sounds so convincing to her own ears, so she goes even further, adds, "I just felt kind of discouraged. It's hard to reconnect to my peers." But she doesn't care to connect with them, she has better things to do. Still, she looks away in feigned shame, and the woman—her mother, she thinks, but only after a bit of hesitation—holds her again.

"It's alright," she says, "It's not your fault. Give it some time."

It's easy, it's so easy. _It's easiest with the people closest to me. They don't expect it._ She feels as though the girl from the dream is looming over her shoulder just behind her, present even when she hardly remembers her, telling her what to say.

"I know," she tells the woman, "I'm okay. I'll be okay."

The letters are waiting right where she left them, more confessions and revelations, more things that make her both uneasy and curious. "Dear Ken Kaneki," one says, "I'm sure you remember the circumstances of our meeting; Anteiku and Ogai. I think about it from time to time, but tonight I really started thinking. You were paying close attention to what I read back then. You got to know me through my reading material. At the time, I didn't get it, but I think it's cute now.

It's also a bit frustrating, though, because I think up until then you'd been right most of the time and had a system worked out. That's not to say that you were wrong about me; certainly, only a few particular types pick the sorts of things I do, and _No Longer Human_ , especially. But you weren't paying close enough attention, I think, or you would've known about what's in these letters without ever reading them, the things I've done and thought.

People who read Dazai might just be curious. People who enjoy his work are probably just as warped as he was. I'm never going to admit this; you have a certain idea of who I am and what I'm like, and for the most part, I'm comfortable as that person. But sometimes, in these private moments, I fantasize about being honest.

What kind of face would you make as you struggle to reconcile who I am with who I try to be for you? What kinds of things would you ask? Would you even be able to look at me anymore? I think of myself as impossible to read, but I met your friend, the mask maker, and he saw right through me. I think you're discerning enough to do the same, if only you weren't quite so desperate for something to hold onto.

I'm holding onto you, too, you know. Just as desperately, maybe more."

Every letter brings up far more questions than answers. She's left more confused than before, less certain about her own identity and who "Eika Ishihara" really was, or even is, and an all-consuming obsession with this former self only drives her deeper into her research, into dreams of flowers and people she doesn't know, of dark places and cold hands.

Something, something deep inside is fracturing.

* * *

Sen Takatsuki invites her out for coffee and they spend most of the time talking about things Eika doesn't care about. The casual chatter about her recent academic work and her current plans for life after graduation begins to grate on her nerves after the first ten minutes, and she clumsily changes the subject with a question about Sen's latest book.

The other woman shrugs. "What about it?"

"Tell me a little bit about it."

Sen laughs. "You've read it, haven't you? What else is there to say?"

"You said at the beginning that I inspired it," Eika says, "You started working on it well before the accident, but you said that was really what made the story click for you."

She receives an amused but somewhat confused stare in response. "And…?"

Eika takes a deep breath. "The truth is," she says, "I'm struggling to take my therapist's advice. I'm supposed to be comfortable with who I am now, but I really want to know who I used to be."

Sen rests her elbows on the table and leans forward, smiling. "Miss Ishihara," she says, "Haven't you ever heard that ignorance is bliss?" She doesn't wait for a response. "The moral of _Tokyo Amnesia_ is that people are processes. Who we are in this moment is another shade in the gradient of ourselves. You're not a different person; you're you, just in a different color."

"A very different color," Eika scoffs, "And I'm not sure if it's further in the past or the present along that gradient. Does that metaphor really work for me?"

"You're much more outspoken than you used to be."

"Stop it," Eika snaps, surprised when she realized she's stood up and yelled, the other people in the café staring at her. She sinks back into her chair, embarrassed. "Don't say things like that," she says, softer this time, "Not when you're telling me who I used to be doesn't matter."

"It was just an observation," Sen insists, "But if it bothers you so much, then I'm sorry. I'll try to be more considerate." The automatic doors open and a harsh winter breeze follows on the coattails of the shivering couple who enter. Sen glances back at them momentarily. "Cold today, isn't it?"

Eika frowns. There really isn't anyone she can talk to about this. The only person she can trust is her former self, a person who really didn't seem that trustworthy. Still, she keeps in mind what Sen told her as she bids her farewell. _Outspoken_. Apparently that's new.

She realizes it is quite cold when she goes outside, tugging up the collar of her coat and sticking her hands in her pockets. A few snowflakes fall onto her eyelashes and melt there, blurring her view of the street, and for a moment, all of the people look a bit like monsters.

* * *

 _Long ago, there was a traveling samurai who sought to travel to Mt. Mikami and rested at an inn on the final night of his journey. In his dreams, he heard the voice of a great serpent that told him its home on the mountain had been stolen by a giant centipede, and it begged the samurai to slay the beast._

 _Centipedes are strange, Eika thinks. Even snakes are treated better in mythology, their jealous nature merely one facet of their larger role as messengers, larval dragons that deserve respect and fear. But the centipede does not have the luxury of begrudging respect; it is simply an omen of misfortune and calamity, a creature of persistent evil._

 _And so when the samurai goes in the night to Mt. Mikami and sees two lights like lanterns glowing in the distance, the eyes of the centipede as it climbs down the mountain towards him, he does not hesitate to draw his bow._

 _Wise was he, cleverer than those who came before him, a trail of their bones leading up the mountain, fools who fought with swords and spears and broke them against the centipede's tough shell. This warrior took aim and fired an arrow straight through the centipede's eye where he knew it would be weak._

 _With that, the centipede fell dead, and the world rejoiced._

* * *

A café in the 20th ward is on the morning news for a few days, caught in the crossfire and demolished in the night by ghouls and CCG Investigators. Eika sees the pile of rubble in the local newspaper and on TV over and over, and something about it makes her feel even emptier. "A shame," her mother says, setting the newspaper down on the kitchen table as she goes to clean up their plates, "But I guess it's good to know the CCG is doing its job."

Eika nods automatically, not paying attention. She opens another letter in the new batch that came in today, yet another reader asking Miss Ishihara to take care and do her best. Eika felt comforted and delighted not so long ago to see things like this, but now even this doesn't make her feel any better. Something is missing. Someone is missing.

(She is missing, and it isn't right.)

"Since you have some time off for the holidays," her mother says, back turned to her as she uses the sink, "I was thinking we'd take a trip somewhere. We've never gone to a hot spring resort. Wouldn't that be fun?"

"Yeah," Eika lies, "That would be." She opens another letter. More kind sentiments. More praise for things she didn't write. More love for this girl who isn't her. She feels sick.

"Oh, and we could buy you a nice, new yukata! Your old one's looking a little ragged, don't you think? Then, when summer rolls around, you can go to some festivals with your classmates."

"Sure." More, more, _more_ , a never ending pile of meaningless words, letters sent to someone who will never get them. Eika wants to rip the rest into little pieces but she stops herself, takes a deep breath, tries to calm down.

 _Who am I?_ she thinks, panicked, _Who the hell are these people writing to?_

But the next letter is different. Her name is written hastily across the envelope rather than in the neat and overly careful manner of the rest. She tears it open and smooths out the letter, squinting and tilting the paper to make out the chicken scratch before her.

"Dear Eika Ishihara," it begins, "You probably don't remember me or my name anymore, and that's okay. He wanted that. He probably wouldn't want me to write to you. But I don't know what else to do. It's not fair. Someone has to tell you. I think you'd be happier not knowing, but I have to say something."

Eika reads over the next line several times; once, certain she misread it. Twice, thinking she's missing something. Three times, beginning to hyperventilate.

"Ken Kaneki is dead."

She takes a shuddering breath and holds it, counts down, like her therapist told her to, but it doesn't help at all.

"He's dead," the letter goes on, "I'm sorry. I know you won't want to know this, but I have to tell you. If I don't, you'll never know. I bet you'd try to find him otherwise. But please don't look, because there's nothing to find. Tsukiyama and Hinami," it says, but the name is crossed out, "Nobody is taking it well. Ken's other friends are having trouble, too. I want to ask you to come back, but he definitely wouldn't want that. You need to stay safe. You shouldn't worry. Telling you this is probably just going to make you worry. I'm sorry. I hope you write more books. I hope you keep him in mind. I hope you can be happy. That's what he would've wanted."

It isn't signed. Eika searches frantically for the sender's address but finds nothing, like it was placed directly in the mailbox by someone who didn't want to be found.

Who was Ken Kaneki? She can't remember a face, just feelings; pleasant feelings. He had silver hair, didn't he? Or maybe it was black? He was in the memoir, she thinks, but his name was never mentioned. He told her to keep him a secret, to stay away from him and remember him, and he'd been tearful when he said goodbye that day, disappearing into the crowd at the train station. He hadn't wanted to sever his ties with her, she thought, but he still went through with it, trying to let her go.

And it _wasn't fair_ , not when she wasn't ready to let go, even if she didn't know it.

"Eika?" the woman calls, turning around as she dries off her hands, "Are you listening?"

She isn't, but she says she is, and she tries to hold on. She tries to keep her expression neutral and her heartbeat steady and her body still, tries not to betray what she's feeling. It's as if that void that's been gradually widening since she woke up without a single memory from her past has finally swallowed her whole, yet she sees herself falling in, sees herself screaming in frustration and pain from somewhere up above.

That is Murasame, she thinks, that is peace and tranquility and normalcy, but it is born of delusion and lies. And when she's finally able to admit it, it all suddenly comes flooding back to her, one drop at a time that builds into a great wave, and it hits her hard enough that she starts to cry.

Her last mask shatters into irretrievable pieces. Eika clutches her own face, frightened, trying to hide from the world.

"What's wrong?" her mother asks, "Did I say something? Would you rather just stay home for the rest of the break?"

Eika shakes her head. "No, it's okay," she says, "I'm okay. Just remembered something."

"Remembered what?"

She meets her mother's eyes, and the woman flinches. Eika thinks she must see her own daughter again. "Everything."

And Eika Ishihara as her readers and her classmates and as Sen Takatsuki and Ken Kaneki knows her might have cried. But Eika Ishihara as only her mother knows her sits motionless, staring down at the letter on the table with absolute certainty that the sender either lied or didn't know what he was talking about, because this has happened once before. Ken Kaneki was not dead then, and he is not dead now, and she will look for him if she wants to even if that's not what he would have liked.

She will find him, and she will make sure this never happens again.

* * *

 **Come back next week for the final chapter.**


	15. PS: This Isn't Over

_The Living Ghost_ becomes an overnight best-seller, but Eika is still bitter about it.

"It's not selling because it's well-written," she complains, "It's selling because people think it's semi-autobiographical, and they're clamoring to know 'the real Eika Ishihara.'" She taps her uneven but growing nails over an old copy of _Masks_.

The café manager, Touka, who stands behind the counter drying off a teacup, laughs softly. "I'd wish them luck, but I already know that's a hopeless endeavor. You can't blame them for being curious, though."

Indeed, she can't; whenever she catches a glimpse of a TV special about her newest book, her name is inseparable from the moniker "recluse novelist," something that's stuck with her for the last two years as she's gradually faded from the public eye, refusing to make television appearances, give interviews or even do book signings. The letters she used to get were filled with concern and well-wishes, assumptions about whatever tragedy must have befallen her to cause her sudden change in demeanor.

"I've seen you nearly every day for the last couple years," Touka says, "But I can't claim to know you at all."

Eika shrugs, taking a sip of her caramel coffee. "If it makes you feel any better, I don't do it on purpose."

"I don't know if I believe that."

They fall silent for a moment, and Eika smiles. "You know me better than most, then."

"I wouldn't say that. I'm just careful, and I don't trust easily."

Eika sets her coffee down, cup clinking gently against the porcelain plate. "I really appreciate that about you," she says, "Your honesty, I mean. I wish we'd spoken sooner."

"We spoke back in Anteiku," Touka points out.

"We exchanged a sentence or two, that hardly counts."

Touka laughs. "You wouldn't have wanted to know me in high school, anyway. I'm nothing like I used to be."

"I like to think the same about myself."

Eika receives a skeptical look from the manager and just smiles peaceably in response. This is her new daily routine, a regular stop on her way home from Kamii, meaningless conversation sandwiched between all of the other meaningless things she does the rest of the day. It's strange, she thinks, for everything to be so devoid of passion or significance, for all of her academic papers and social interactions and even the novels she pens to feel so utterly meaningless when she, as a student of literature, should be able to find meaning in even the most inane things.

She hesitates to call Touka a friend, but the two of them take solace in one another's company despite holding so many unspoken words in their eyes, never quite saying what they mean yet sympathetic to each other's woes. She's certain that Touka knows, somehow, that she's mindful of Eika's disappointed glance around the café when she walks in.

"This isn't Anteiku," she'd told her on one of her first visits, without ever being asked.

 _He's not here,_ she meant.

Eika thinks they must be kindred spirits, or at least two strangers who knew someone in common, because they never speak his name.

Touka puts the clean dish away and leans over the counter. "You graduate soon, don't you? What do you think you'll do after that?"

"Nothing interesting," Eika says, "Keep writing and start saving for a better apartment, I guess."

"Will you keep coming here?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

Touka hesitates, breaking her gaze. "Just asking," she says, "Sometimes, people just leave. At least give me a heads up if you decide to take off."

Eika's gaze softens. She hears the bells above the café door jingle as someone comes in. "I would let you know."

Touka opens her mouth to say something but the lingering silence makes her glance over at the silver-haired waiter loitering at the counter instead. "Yomo, you're supposed to welcome customers."

She's met by silence. Eika follows her gaze and finds the man staring intently at the café door.

"Just a minute," Touka mutters in frustration, walking away to scold her coworker.

Eika opens _Masks_ and tries to distract herself with the story but has trouble focusing. It wasn't supposed to be like this, she thinks, she wasn't supposed to be sitting here alone and being eaten alive by her regrets _._ She really had tried her hardest to find any trace of him, had gone to some dark, unpleasant places and scoured every corner of Tokyo for any bit of hearsay she could find, but she'd come up empty and more frustrated than before.

 _In Noh,_ she thinks, _this would have been a divine play in honor of the god of misfortune, one tragedy begetting another._

She feels someone staring and turns to look over her shoulder with a frown.

Her heart stops.

"Oh," the young man behind her says sheepishly, startled at the intensity of her gaze, "Sorry, I was being nosy. I just wanted to know what you were reading."

It can't be. His hair is white at the tips but black at the roots, eyes a soft gray, wearing the crisp trench coat of a CCG investigator, but his face is so, _so_ familiar. _It can't be._

" _Masks_ ," Eika says stiffly, "By Fumiko Enchi."

"Ah, I don't know if I've read that one yet. Would you recommend it?"

She takes a deep breath, trying to stay calm. "Yes," she says, "I really would. It's one of my favorites."

"Hey," someone calls harshly from the next table, another investigator, by the looks of it, "Are you gonna order or what? We don't have all day."

"I know," he says back, and gives Eika an apologetic smile, "Do you come by here a lot? I'll try to catch you some other time, maybe when I'm off work."

"I don't really know you," Eika says uneasily, the words intended more for herself than for him, because surely this isn't what she thinks it is. He isn't who she's looking for.

"No," he allows, touching his chin thoughtfully, "But I can tell you really like to read by the condition your book's in, so we already have something in common."

She glances down self-consciously at _Masks_ , the pen marks, the margin notes, the folded corners. She feels her heart beating faster.

He doesn't even give his name, walking back to the other table where two other Investigators are waiting, and Eika watches—watches the way he looks at Touka and pauses as if unsure of something, watches his face redden and tears bubble to the surface, and then he's overcome with confusion at his own reaction.

Eika watches, and she decides that she was right.

The curtain has lifted and the first act of a new play begins, all of the actors assembled, all of their masks in place. Ken Kaneki is alive and well, wearing a different mask than before, one that's already beginning to fall apart, paint flaking off and cracks appearing in the surface. Eika, sitting a world away with a cold cup of coffee and a new mask on her face, is determined to tear his mask away, to find Ken underneath it all, because she knows that what she wants—who she wants—is in there somewhere.

All she has to do is tear this stranger apart to find him.

* * *

 **It looks like I have a trilogy on my hands, but I want to get caught up with the manga a bit before launching into that. Chances are that, like last time, it'll be a while before I'm ready with the next (and final) part of this series, but I really will try to be back. A huge thank you to all of my readers, everyone who left reviews and enjoyed the story.**


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